Fighting the Landlord

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So, last night my new student friend Jeff called me to ask if I wanted to come to his apartment off-campus to play "Fight the Landlord" ("Dou Di Zhu" in Chinese) with him and his girlfriend. This is a game I really like cause it's a card game (so more my style than majiang), and also I'm actually kinda good at it. So, he asked what time would be good; I said whenever. So 10 a.m. it was! So, I met him at an agreed on spot and then he led me to his apartment which is above the little market street where all the students go to eat street food and where you can buy all sorts of random things (catcus plants, pens and paper, jewelry, scarves in the winter, my beloved "goo cups", meat (or fish) on sticks, and on and on). He shares the apartment with his girlfriend and I think maybe three other people. So we went into his room where he has his table for studying set up. We spent the first hour and a half looking over his study materials for the up coming TEM4 exam that so many of the English major students are taking on April 23. It's this very hardcore test that they have to take in their junior year, and if they don't pass, then they don't get the certificate for their degree, so it's very serious. Many people don't pass the first time. So we worked on cloze passages where you have to choose the best word (and the choices are VERY tricky, even for native speakers) as well as grammar blank questions (also very difficult, especially to explain). Then we played Fight the Landlord until lunch time. But when we went out into the main room, we discovered it was raining quite hard. So we watched some CCTV international Chinese news for a little while. Then we went to lunch. Jeff and his girlfriend (who is very shy and not an English major so shy also to speak English, although she understands okay I think) took me to a new place for lunch. It was a place that serves porridge, tang yuen and many other noodle and dumplings. I had "Ba Bao Zhou" which is a sweet black rice porridge with some peanuts and some other Chinese fruit (name unknown by me, Jeff, and his girlfriend). Tang Yuen is a small round dough ball with sweet sugar inside (sometimes black and sometimes mixed with ground peanut). After lunch, Jeff's girlfriend (I can't remember her Chinese name yet) went back to their apartment, and then Jeff and I went to the wang ba (internet cafe) to play some games. He signed me into his QQ chat so that I could play Fight the Landlord online. Unlike my apparent live skill, in online Fight the Landlord I suck in splendid fashion, losing ALL the games. However, it was still fun. But after two hours of such fun, I was ready for a nap, so I headed back to my pad for a nap. And unlike yesterday where I desired a nap but couldn't get it to take, I actually had one today, dreams included. A ringing phone woke me up, and then I went to have dinner at the campus cafeteria/restaraunt. I had the deep-fried zuchinni and whole peppers in oil. It was good. Going to the campus cafeteria is part of my new resolution to fully integrate into the Chinese food scene (minus meat still, of course) as well as saving some dough. Then I came back and have just been doodling around on the internet and doing some lesson planning and such. So now I've just got my favorite rap playlist jammin and am doing this blog. I'm excited because I have plans for making Jeff and his girlfriend American food on Wednesday night at my place. I'm going to get ingredients tomorrow for Eggplant Parmesan and some kind of dessert. So that's exciting--it'll be maybe the third thing I've cooked while in China. Ha ha. I much prefer to just eat out (more convenient, cheaper, and if just for me, I don't really enjoy cooking that much). So, that's the scoop for now. There are a few pictures here. Until later :)

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