Chinese Military Madness

I have now finally started class, which is long and full of Chinese and starts at 8am every morning, and occasionally goes on for 6 hours before it stops. On the whole, however, I do quite like it, although the amount of new words I am supposed to be learning is faintly obscene. I think it is something like 30 a day. True to form, I have also just bought myself Harry Potter in Chinese, and suspect I might end up reading that a lot, rather than the textbooks I am supposed to be reading...

However, whilst I have started class, the Chinese haven't. Instead they have started their compulsory military training, which means on emerging from class, dazed and dizzied and no longer sure which language I speak, I am quite often greeted by the site of our campus full of teenagers in khaki goosestepping in formation. They are quite literally forced to use every available piece of ground in the campus to find space for all the classes/regiments, and most of their training appears to consist of how to march in formation, shout 'yi,er, yi', and how to stand very still for hours on head, which are of course important skills for any university student. Occasionally we do hear distant war cries drifting through our open classroom windows, so I am not entirely sure that they aren't doing something more exciting when we can't see them.

Most of the students though look reassuringly like they don't really care. They run amusingly out of formation, you can spot the couple who are refusing to sacrifice their hairstyles to khaki baseball caps, and half of them are so short they look about 14 and are a little swallowed by their fatigues. Most of them give the impression they'll just be really happy to finally get into lectures.

More worrying was wandering through campus one night, I was a little startled to hear the familiar 'yi, er, yi', but shouted with enthusiasm, and turned round to find an entire regiment of older men running in formation bearing down on me, and not about to stop. They were a little scarily professional, moving in time, all the same height, all slightly muscled, and all appearing to belong to our university. I'm starting to wonder what exactly kind of university it is...

Last night, we were also treated to half an hour of air raid sirens to mark the anniversary of the Manchurian Incident. It mostly resulted in a lot of dogs barking, although I was woken this morning by what sounded suspiciously like gunfire, and I'm really hoping they haven't decided to reenact the rest of the Manchurian Incident as well.