I don't have much to write about this time, but I thought I'd give a quick update. I don’t think I mentioned this before, but a couple weeks ago I bought a tailored suit from the Silk Market. It is very nice. I got a 3 piece design with the best fabric they had. I didn’t get silk because I don’t think I, or anyone else, should wear an all silk suit. It has silk lining though so that is nice. A few days ago I put it on and Lihau and Zach took some pictures of it, so I will [View Full Entry]

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上个周末我去了广州旅行。我去看我的中国朋友，潇楠。两个年前她来过明尼苏达。我的飞机八点起飞。 因为我走错地铁站，所以七点半我才到北京飞机场。 到广州以后 [View Full Entry]

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I haven’t written a blog for a while so I have a couple things to write about. First of all, two weekends ago our group trip to the mountain and our experience making American breakfast in China. I’m also going to talk about last weekend, Friday we went to Xidan (shee-dan) and Saturday my Rural Economics class visited a village and I went with some friends to an acrobatics show. Two Fridays ago we didn’t do much; we stayed in and watched a movie because the next day we had to get up to climb a mountain. We left for the [View Full Entry]

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This blog is all about 内蒙古 . After staying up too late on Wednesday night, my alarm went off at 4am Thursday morning. After taking a cold shower, because they don’t boil water until about 6, I went across the hall to meet up with Lihau Monica and Zach. Shortly after I arrived Howie came in and he was wired on Chinese canned coffee, I’m not sure what they put in them but whatever it was it let Howie finish his homework and made him crazy. We all left Beida at about 4:30 because our bus left from the Beijing Language [View Full Entry]

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The last few days have been really fun; I have quite a bit to write about for such a short time. On Friday we went to La Bamba at 6 o’clock. La Bamba is the restaurant above Propaganda, which is the most popular bar/club in our area. As I’m sure you figured out, it is Mexican food, which is a big deal in China because all the Chinese people I have asked have never even tried Mexican food. It was exciting to find somewhere to get it. On Fridays before 7 they have burritos for 10 yuan! ($1.50) They are big [View Full Entry]

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Now that it’s been a few weeks since I got here, I’m getting used to living in China. I keep discovering more delicious food as well. Yesterday Nikki brought me to a little place that sells cold noodles on campus. It’s nothing too exciting, as the name implies, the noodles are cold and they put bean sprouts, peanut sauce, cucumber strips, some other sauces and spicy if you want it. It’s one of the simplest things I’ve eaten here but one of the most delicious. A couple days ago I also went to a vegetarian restaurant with Emma, Nikki and Hilary. [View Full Entry]

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This entry is going to be about last weekend and a little bit more about the food here. As I've said before the food is very greasy, not much is fried like Chinese food in America, but it's all cooked using plenty of oil so it's very greasy. They put a bunch of oil especially in noodles. I love the noodle house, although it's hard to find stuff without meat in it because it doesn't always tell you on the menu that there's meat. Since my spoken Chinese is improving a lot I'm not confident enough to talk to the cashier [View Full Entry]

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I found out that the huge lily pad things in the pond outside my window are edible. Apparently people eat the roots and according to my friend Will they are kind of gross. In the picture with the number 49 in it on my previous blog you can see some people picking them. Will lives with a host family because he's in immersion chinese and his family made him some of that for dinner one day. What he's doing sounds really scary. He has to sign a pledge that says he won't speak any English Monday through Friday and he is [View Full Entry]

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Even though it's only been a couple days since I last wrote I have a lot to write this time. We went on a 3 day trip to the Great Wall and Chengde. Everyone knows what the great wall is but Chengde is a city about 4 hours from Beijing by bus. The city isn't very big for a Chinese city, about 500,000. There are many Buddhist temples and palaces around Chengde. We went to a few of them and they were really pretty. I posted a bunch of pictures from them, there are more descriptions on those pictures. I also [View Full Entry]

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I arrived in Beijing at about 8pm local time. I had a LOOONG travel experience. The flight from Mpls to Chicago went well, it seemed like we hardly got on and we were landing. I got to my gate for Beijing almost 2 hours early so I walked around the airport for a while. I came back right before the scheduled boarding time and the flight had been postponed until 2, it was suppose to leave before 1. We waited a while and they eventually told us that the plane had enging problems so we had to wait for a new [View Full Entry]

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