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Published: September 26th 2012
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Am I Still In London?
In London, I made it my mission to find all 84 of these guys that were located all around the city. Guess I'll still be trying to find them forever. Fun Fact: If your foot gets over 8 bug bites in one day, it swells to twice its normal size.
Fun Fact: If you study abroad in China, you should bring an entire suitcase filled with bug spray, and another suitcase filled entirely with cream for when the bug spray doesn't work and your entire body itches.
Fun Fact: Apparently, mosquito bites leave scars here.
Fun Fact: It looks like I have the chicken pox right now with how many bug bites I currently have. And since they leave scars afterwards, I guess I'm going to look like I have the chicken pox forever. SEXY.
I don't know what it is about me, but all of the bugs in China seem to be in love with me. Every day for the past month since we've been here, I've awoken to find a whole new mess of mosquito bites. At first it was because my roommate would leave the windows open (there are no screens for the windows here) and the lights on at night and the mosquitos would flock to our room. After I figured out how to say that if we kept doing that I would
Police Everywhere!
Not sure if you can tell since this picture was taken at night, but they're rolling in the extra cops at our school due to the large number of protests over those unoccupied islands the Chinese and Japanese are fighting over die from blood loss with the amount the mosquitos were taking every night, I thought my problems would be over. False. The only good news is that it's not like there's something wrong with me--other Americans are also getting eaten every day by mosquitos that are leaving scars. At least there will be a whole mess of us that look like we have the chicken pox forever.
Assuming I don't die from mosquito bites, this is our last week of school before our one week break. It's an international holiday here so everyone in China is off for the week--one of my teachers said it was like the Chinese version of July 4th, but I'm not really sure they knew what July 4th was so who knows. A couple of friends and I are going to Chengdu, home of the panda bears, before flying up North to Beijing to visit all of the tourist attractions that China is well known for. I'm really excited to see some panda bears, and also excited to have a break from school for a week. I can't believe I've already been in school for a month--it feels like I've only just arrived in
Only in China....
Only in China would you find two aisles dedicated to badminton and one aisle dedicated to ping pong paddles...and a corner where they sell two basketballs and half of a skateboard in the sports section. China. If I were in London right now, my trip would be half over. Crazy.
This week, I got in touch with my inner Chinese side. On Saturday, a couple of us took a 2 hour tai chi class. The instructor only knew two English words, "Look me", which I think meant "watch me do this because all of you are doing it wrong". However, she kept coming over to me and saying, "feichang piaoliang" which means "extremely beautiful". I think she was amazed at how fast I picked up what she showed us. I neglected to tell her I spent my entire childhood doing Kung Fu every single day after school. I'm perfectly fine with her thinking I'm a natural.
In other news, on Monday I had an interesting class experience--one I was dreading ever since I found out my class size was three including me. Monday, both of my classmates were sick, so it was me and two teachers for three hours. Let's just talk about how fun that was not. First of all, I had decided to not write the pinyin (a phonetic way to sound out Chinese characters) in my textbook to help me
Zhe Shi Wo De Lao Shi
This is one of my two Chinese teachers. Unlike my professors back in the states, we go out to eat with them and at night they sometimes teach us other things--in this case Chinese calligraphy. The great thing about Chinese calligraphy is that it combines the two things that I am worst at in the world--Chinese and calligraphy. Sucks to be artistically challenged. Anyways, Huang Lao Shi first started yelling at me because I wasn't holding the brush right. However, she really freaked out when she watched me write my name in the wrong stroke order. In my defense, I think that you should be able to make up your own stroke order for your own name! She strongly disagreed with me. out like I usually do because I'm trying to stop relying on pinyin (the downside being that it makes me read slower than molasses), and second of all I had stayed up late the night before reading a really good book about a kid that has cancer who falls in love with another kid who has cancer--spoiler alert: they both died tragically at the end. Anyways, because there were 1/3 of the kids that there usually are, we blew through the lesson so my teacher started using a whole bunch of words I didn't know. She'd ask me questions and I'd say in Chinese "I have no idea what you just said can you please say it again?" or I'd mix it up a bit with "I have no idea" and then she'd yell "I don't like when you say 'I don't know!'". Needless to say, it was a great learning/teaching environment.
Anyways, I'd best get back to packing--we all know how good I am at that. But I'm just bringing my brand new backpacking backpack on our 10 day adventure so it shouldn't take me too long in theory. We don't fully have it planned out yet (we haven't exactly bought a return ticket back to Shanghai) but we're just going to kind of see how it goes. Hopefully we'll do some more hiking and see some panda bears and monkeys and maybe a wall or two...I hear they're pretty Great here if you catch my drift. I'll try to update frequently but I honestly have no idea what I'm going to find in Chengdu or Beijing. Worse comes to worse, I'll post a million blog updates next Sunday!
PS Sorry if this blog looks really funny and the pictures are all messed up. I'm having a lot of difficulty with this post right now for some reason--I tried to publish in on Sunday and it didn't work. It's still not working all that fantastically but this is the best I can do right now!
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