Scampering About Town

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Today has just been fantastic! Josh (the American) and I met up with his friend Josh (the other American) and had lunch at Paul's Steak & Eggs. These American's are bad influences as I have now had two western meals in the past two days. Just ridiculous. However, when I noticed that they had greek salad (FETA!) and just caved. Mixed greens don't exist here, but overall it was just really nice to eat something fresh.

After lunch we decided to run some errands and while we were looking for American Apparel we got off at the wrong stop, but God smiled down on us and we stumbled across an amazing JamicaBlue coffee shop. My buds were salivating just at the mere thought of GOOD coffee (near impossible to find) and as a cherry on top, a free piece of cheesecake was included with every large coffee. It was heaven. We settled into the comfy chairs, sipped on the coffee, nibbled the cheesecake and got so lost in chatting that two hours passed before we remembered that we still had things to complete. So we shopped for a bit, and then took the subway to AN ENGLISH BOOKSTORE! Wooooooo!!! I was in heaven. So I sniffed my way through shelf after shelf, totally happy just to gaze around at all the titles. One of the staff was really friendly... we chatted for a bit and then she brought me over to this computer where you have mimic Mandarin into the microphone... apparently I have excellent pronunciation! I bought ipod Mandarin lessons that were on sale, so I'm excited to try and improve my vocabulary.

Meeting his friends turned out to be a tricky task, as our hutong street has been under construction for so long, and the entire street is ripped out. You are forced to make your way along the cracked off sidewalk (which is about one and a half feet wide). Not the easiest in broad daylight, let alone in the dark, with large amount of people coming and going. Yes, you have to flatten yourself against a wall so oncoming pedestrian traffic can pass you. I saw one couple slip down into the construction zone. Perilous.

Later on, a group of us went out to go dancing. We stumbled across this little 80's Dance Night which I instantly fell in love with, but the others weren't so keen on. They decided to leave, but I chose to stick around, because I was having such an amazing time being as silly as possible. I joined this girl who was dancing on stage and had a series of dance offs with this elder Chinese couple. They were amazing. Everyone in that whole club was so friendly, it didn't even matter that I was alone. I danced until 3 in the morning and easily caught a cab back to the hostel. I love this place!

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