Advertisement
Kao Ya
From Left: Peter, Hayley, Carolyn, Kelsey, Me, Tina Sorry I haven't updated in a while. So much has happened in the past week that I want to tell you about, but first I want to give you all a run down of what a normal day here is like.
7:00 : I wake up, shower, and study for class
9:00 - 12:00 : Class with Zhu Chen (my chinese teacher from hampshire)
12:00 - 2:00 : We go out for lunch, maybe go to the store. Sometimes I study to prepare for my one-on-one afternoon session with Fang Laoshi.
2:30 - 3:30 : One-on-one with Fang Laoshi
4:00 - 7:30 : A little free time in the afternoon, usually spent doing homework. Maybe a trip to Jia La Fuo (Carrafore), the big french walmart about a 10 minute walk from our apartment.
7:30 - 8:30/9:00 : My tutor, Summer, comes over and we chat in chinese and go over homework
9:00 : figure out dinner, either go out or cook here. Do more homework, usually go to bed around 11:30 or 12:00.
Everyday is scheduled like this except for the weekends. Weekends we have a cultural activity and free time. Last Sunday, the girls and I went shopping
The poodle
we named him acid trip at bu xing jie (walking street). A couple of the university students, Peter and Tina, took us. Shopping for clothes in China is cheap. I bough a jumper for 40 yuan, $5.75. The downfall is all the girls here are tiny. They don't have curves, no tush no chest, so finding something that you both like and that fits is rare.
After shopping we went to have kao ya (roast duck). At bu xing jie there is a huge duck restaurant where we sat in a private room. It was so gorgeous, the wallks were covered in gold wallpaper and we sat in plush purple velvet chairs. We dined like kings! Everything was delicious, especially the duck! Feeding 7 people at the restaurant only cost 140 yuan. We can't wait to go back and stuff ourselves with duck again, and again and again. After lunch and shopping we let our tutors go because they were tired but we wanted to hang out more at bu xing jie. We walked around and found a park where we enjoyed a fun house and a ferris wheel ride. We enjoyed the park so much that we went back yesterday and rented a
paddle boat and went on some more rides.
At bu xing jie we found a pet shop. I only mention it because they had the most unbelievable poodle. It was styled and its fur was all different colors, it even had little nail covers on its paws. It was both adorable and hideous and we couldn't get enough.
This week we had a vacation for Duanwu (Dragon Boat) Festival so we didn't have class Thursday or Friday. On Thursday night some of the tutors threw us a party for the festival. In preparation, Brian Kelsey and I went to Jia La Fuo with Cherry and Fish (two of the tutors) to buy groceries. The place was packed. We were there for three hours buying salty duck eggs, preserved eggs (100 year egg), zongzi (sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves) and many different meats, veggies and sweets. At the party we ate a lot of food, our contribution to the festivities was several large bowls of jungle juice and a couple games of beirut. The Chinese boys really enjoyed both! After everyone had enough food and drink we enjoyed some performances. I sang "you are my sunshine" in Chinese
Jia La Fuo
so many people with Hayley and Kelsey, Carolyn read a poem, and the boys sang a song Parimal wrote. The Chinese students performed too, Johnny played the flute, one of the girls played Clarinet, Christina danced and Gloria played a traditional chinese instrument (the name of which I completely forget) like an angel. The student's dorms here lock down at 11:00 so the party ended early and we all said good night.
Last night w had a couple great adventures. After a long day at the park, we went to a DVD store where I purchased DVDs for 9 yuan (if you have any requests, let me know). Post-DVD shopping, the girls and I sat around talking about all the food we were craving: Cheese, raw veggies, pizza, normal butter (not the sweet butter icing you get at the bakeries here). We finally made the decision to give in and go to McDonalds. When we got in the cab and we told the driver where to take us he laughed and asked us where we "wai guo ren" (foreigners) were from. Women shi mei guo ren (we're american) we told him. We had a nice chat with him on the ride there
preserved egg
preserved in tea leaves and then enjoyed some fresh french fries, mcnuggest and burgers (the only way to get cheese). When we made it back to campus we decided to go out to a bar. Ralph had told us to go to Night Hawk but we didn't know how to get there. We asked the cab driver to take us to a place that wasn't the revolutionary bar we visit all to often. He drove us right to the Night Hawk, which was a bar where you can buy waitresses. At one point they even got on stage and walked around as some sort of display of who was available. We made quite a spectacle though, everyone wanted to talk to us and all of the waitresses came over and toasted us. We left the Night Hawk and went to another bar called 39 degrees, where we got invited to hang out at someones table, they gave us a lot of bing cha (iced tea) and we danced. We all wanted to drink more but the beers were more expensive and to get shots you had to buy a bottle. So I made a trip around the bar and made a friend who ended
preserved egg
they are black and the yoke is green up giving us his bottle of Jameson and his table (which you have to pay for) because he was leaving. Then we all had a great time, had plenty of jameson and iced tea and danced for a while. When the bar closed some more people we had met invited us to go eat afterward. It was 2 am and we went to a restaurant, sat at a big table on the sidewalk and ate Crawfish. We finally made it home around 3 and remembered that this morning we had a cultural activity, learning to play the guzheng.
The guzheng was amazing, it was impossible to sound terrible so we enjoyed a morning of lovely music. Now we plan on spending the afternoon at the science and technology museum, where they have an earthquake simulation room! I'll try to be more active with the blog for you all.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.071s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 9; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0403s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
ashley Cope
non-member comment
i miss you! those black eggs look scary! did you really eat them?