May 21st

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The past two days have been very busy, so I will do my best to recap for you all. Here goes:

Yesterday we were officially able to leave our house and go out into the city of Hefei! But first we had class. The building I have class in is on the other side of campus and takes about 15 minutes to walk there. It was so refreshing to see people and get out. The campus is huge, and the dorms are so cramped. We are lucky to have an apartment and most of us have single rooms. The Chinese students live six to a room, its very tight living quarters with very little privacy. Our class is on the sixth/top floor of one of the foreign language buildings. Its quite a climb. Zhu Chen, my Chinese teacher from Hampshire and for this summer, is very sweet. In our classroom she has a tea cup for each of us (with our names on them) and she has hung pictures from Hampshire. Classes have been good, we are moving through the material really quickly.

After class we took a walk to the bank and Carrefour (a french store kind of like a walmart or target). Carrefour is in a large mall so we went to the food court for lunch and had hot pot. i ordered a hot broth hot pot and it was so delicious. but, the noodles were wicked spicy and my mouth was on FIRE. dad, you would have loved it! it was sort of like a fondue, we ordered beef, veggies and fish to cook in the broth. after that i returned to campus for my afternoon one-on-one class, after which my tutors took me to buy a cell phone. I have two life tutors, Wenwen and Tiffany and one study tutor, Summer. On our way back from shopping we had dinner on campus. I ordered a bowl of noodles with beef and they made fresh noodles on the spot. The man started with a ball of dough and stretched it and folded it, repeating this until he formed thin noodles. Then he wound them, slapped them on the table and threw them in a pot of water to cook. Only 4 yuan for dinner, less than $1.

Today it was class again early in the morning, after which we went for lunch on campus. Michael Nord brought us to a restaurant that the students went to frequently last summer. We ordered a lot of food and it only cost 46 yuan, split between 8 people it was less than $1 each. Following lunch and my afternoon lesson, Chen Chen, Carolyn and I went to buy a present for one of our professors. Tomorrow we will be attending her wedding reception in Hefei so we bought her a tea set and tea. I will take a lot of photos and provide a full recap of the evening.

China is a very amusing country. As foreigners, we attract a lot of stares. We have made a couple observations, first, everything in china has a face. From fans to clocks to cell phones and pens, everything has a face. Second, china is like one big dollar store. Everything is extremely cheap, food and goods alike.

My upcoming excitement includes the wedding tomorrow, shopping on sunday with my tutors in the center of the city and hopefully we will go out this weekend.

For more in depth coverage of my China experience, via pictures, cultural and lingual highlights, check out Parimal's blog: http://realityequation.net/ he is extremely thorough and really excited about everything china (especially the food).

Sending my love to everyone.

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