Monday was the first day of a regular schedule for us here in Xi’an. We started with breakfast at 7.30. The breakfasts we’ve been getting are kind of a mixture of Chinese and American breakfasts. So alongside toast, jam, and sausage or bacon, we have everyday some sort of noodle and rice gruel. The energy around the breakfast tables was high as we were all excited to start learning the Chinese language and hearing the lectures from our expert on Chinese history.
We walked in the rain to our class building, which is about a ten minute walk from our hotel. At nine we started our language class. We were divided into three groups. There is one advanced class for people who can speak some Chinese already. Then there are two sections of beginning classes. I, of course, am in one of them. During the course of the week, we’ve been told that there may be some shifting of people between the two beginner courses in order to put those who really have a hard time together and to put those who catch on quicker in the other. I hope that I’m in the latter! We didn’t get too far in our first day. We spent the entire hour practicing the sounds of the consonants. The sounds are pretty straight forward, with the exception of their “r” sound, which I can’t seem to get just right. The hour flew by and before we knew it, it was time to move on.
We walked in the rain to our class building, which is about a ten minute walk from our hotel. At nine we started our language class. We were divided into three groups. There is one advanced class for people who can speak some Chinese already. Then there are two sections of beginning classes. I, of course, am in one of them. During the course of the week, we’ve been told that there may be some shifting of people between the two beginner courses in order to put those who really have a hard time together and to put those who catch on quicker in the other. I hope that I’m in the latter! We didn’t get too far in our first day. We spent the entire hour practicing the sounds of the consonants. The sounds are pretty straight forward, with the exception of their “r” sound, which I can’t seem to get just right. The hour flew by and before we knew it, it was time to move on.
Our lecture on Monday from Dr. Juliano was on Neolithic China and the Xi’an Area. Neolithic means “new stone age”, so we were talking about a period from about 5000 to 2500 BCE. (BCE stands for Before the Common Era, which is the term more frequently used by scholars today, since BC has Christian connotations and most of the world really isn’t Christian.) She told us about the early settlements and showed us lots and lots of pictures of pottery. I wondered to myself, “Why would students care about a bunch of old pottery?” Then it kind of hit me. This was the technology of the day. These were the computers and iPhones of the time. This technology allowed for a much easier existence. People could now store things. People could easily bring water from one place to another. This radically changed life, just as the internet is radically changing our lives. For lunch some of our Chinese friends met us outside of our class building and took us to one of the restaurants we’ve eaten at before. As usual, we had several plates of different food, soup, rice, and beverages. There were five Americans and three Chinese students. We Americans paid for the students since they helped us order. Each of us paid just under $3!
After lunch, we took a motor coach out to Banpo Village, which is a Neolithic archaeological dig to the east of Xi’an that was discovered when China was constructing a new power plant back in the 1950s. It was amazing looking at this ancient village that dated back over 5000 years. We were able to see how their homes were built, the structure of their society, how they protected themselves, how they honoured their dead and so on. What was most impressive is thinking that they could do all of this with simple wooden tools and tools made of bone. 
After returning from Banpo, one of the Chinese students met up with a small group of us to help us to practice our Chinese language skills. We spent well over an hour practicing just the basic sounds of the language. Then the group of us went to one of the student restaurants where we enjoyed a dinner of noodles and beer for 6 Yuan a person.
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