Second day!

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Today was awesome. We finally got some sleep and I woke up at 7am, which I'm sure you all know is pretty much impossible for me. I blame it on the jetlag. We got up this morning and as we left our apartment there were three women in red suits practicing tai chi with swords in the lawn outside. We had orientation in the morning and went over the schedule for our session. We are going to visit the panda reserve this weekend, but I found out it is about two hundred dollars in american money to hold a panda for thirty seconds....so I do not think I will be doing that. One of my roommates told me that there is a man who lives in the apartment next to us who trains pigeons, he literally ties a stick to a red ribbon and waves it around, and the pigeons fly around it. I have yet to see it but apparently it happens daily. After orientation we all went out to the city to look around again. We met up with a few of our new chinese friends, who are probably some of the sweetest girls i have ever met, and they helped a few of my friends buy cell phones. We get stared at a lot here and one man blatantly took a picture of us twice since we look very strange to a lot of the people in Chengdu. Little children often run up and say "hello hello!" and then run away, which is really cute. We walked through the city and there are huge markets, one sold duck necks as a snack, one sold rocks that you could purchase for about 60 american dollars hoping to find jade in them, another stand sold bubble tea which has pieces of tapioca at the bottom and is super strange to drink but really good! We showed the attendants at the cell phone stores and our chinese friends our liscences and they were fascinated by them. Crossing the street here is terrifying! There are cars, bikes, pedestrians, scooters, motorcycles, taxis, buses...everything you can imagine and they all consider the lanes and signs to be suggestions rather than rules. However, the people in Chengdu cross the road super nonchalantly! Me and my roommate tried to cross the road and ended up sprinting across because we were scared of getting hit, and we got strange looks. Part of it is that Chengdu is known for its laid back life style. Unfortunately we do have rats living in our apartment part time...I wasnt too concerned about it until I went to get a piece of the bread I bought yesterday only to find that something with small teeth had eaten a corner the size of my fist along with the plastic covering it... I also am writing this blog in the dark because I have not figured out how to turn on the living room lights yet! Hahaha. It is about 80 to 90 degrees here and is pretty humid, my hair has gone wild. Anyhow, tomorrow is the first day of classes so I will update when I'm done with those!

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