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Today was the first day I had any classes other than Chinese! How exciting! Of course, I still had to get up at 7:30 for Chinese, but I'm getting used to it.

This afternoon, I had 20th Century Chinese History class. There are five students and one person auditing and we just have it in a conference room in the dorm building. (Most of the Culture Classes--non language classes--are taught in the dorm because they are so small.) Our professor is a Sichuan University (SCU) professor and he had to leave class early to receive an award, so I think he'll be a good teacher! At SCU, he teaches a general education course in Chinese on American culture, and he gave each of the students in my class (all Americans) a copy of his latest book. Written in English, it is about American culture--there is even a part about barbies! I'm so excited to read it and learn about American culture from a Chinese perspective.

Today our class only lasted one hour, but usually it is supposed to run from 1:30 until 4:15. A doozy. But so far it is interesting and I really like the professor so I don't think it will be too hard to handle.

After class, Audrey, Laura, Maria and I met up with our Chinese friend, 白雪，literally in English "Snow White." We went shopping for a little bit outside the East gate of SCU, but Snow White told us they were charging us way too much so she's going to take us to where she shops this weekend. The prices they were asking today didn't seem bad to me because everything is so cheap here by American standards, so I'm super excited for even better deals. I am getting to be a good bargainer! Then we went out to hot pot for dinner. It wasn't as spicy as I had been expecting and it was really delicious. Snow White ordered for us, and it was all incredible except that she ordered duck feet which was sort of stressful to pull out of the hot pot when I was expecting beef. I have been eating pretty adventurously, but it still had toenails or claws or whatever so I decided to skip that adventure.

This evening, our whole group had our lecture class on Western China, Tibet and Minorities. On Wednesday nights, we have a guest lecturer and on Sunday nights a PLU professor leads a seminar. Tonight, an SCU professor lectured on the idea of a nation-state and how it conflicts with ethnographic nations and minority groups. It was really interesting and a good intro to our focus on Tibet and western minority groups.

Tomorrow evening, I have Modern Chinese culture class which is another lecture that our whole group has together, and on Monday evening I have an environmental studies class on Environmental Issues in China. I think I am overloading on credits but I'm only here for one semester!

I'm in the process of uploading some photos of my life here to flickr, including the terrifying cat who lives in our dorm building.

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