We have arrived!

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The bus sent to the station to pick us up was much too small. We ended up passing the luggage that wouldn't fit in the compartment underneath the bus through a window. Some people ended up sitting in the aisles or on top of the the luggage. But we were so happy to have arrived that we didn't care.

My new roommate in the 四川大学外国学生宿舍 (Sichuan University International Student Dormitory) is Sara(h). (Her birth certificate and her social security card have different spellings, so she spells her name both ways). She is a senior at PLU and will be spending a month in Korea after our semester in China. She speaks Norwegian, but doesn't know very much Chinese yet. We are the only students from our group on the first floor of the dorm building (it is four stories tall), and one of two pairs with a hotel sized room. Everyone else has an anteroom with a large refrigerator, a bathroom, a living/study room with a tv and sofa and coffee table, and a bedroom. We have one room with all of our furniture, and a janky bathroom. This annoys me very much because we are all paying the same price to live here.

Professor Youtz took us to lunch at Peter's Tex Mex, which serves American food. I sat with Professor Adam Cathcart, Kristiana, and Christian. But, more importantly, I ordered a chicken and cheese quesadilla and a strawberry milkshake. The milkshakes at Peter's will be my demise if I am not careful. They cost 25 块。That is about four US dollars, which is expensive here, and half of the daily allowance given me by PLU. However, they are better than any milkshake I have had in America. I will have to try the peanut butter/chocolate kind next time.

Next we visited Trustmart, which is Walmart's store in China. It is a massive two story, Fred Meyer-esque concoction. You go up an escalator and find electronics, appliances, bedding, dishes, clothes, etc. Then you go down another escalator into the grocery store, check out, and leave through a different door altogether. Just like Walmart, Trustmart is a scary place. But it had everything we needed to outfit our rooms. To get there from the dorm is a twenty to thirty minute walk. The taxi ride is less than a dollar and takes about five minutes with traffic.

I dropped my purchases off at the dorm and went out to get mug shots for student identity cards. Nearby we discovered a bootleg movie/cd stand. I bought Vampires Suck for less than a dollar.

I went with Kristiana, Clare, Audrey, and Cara to purchase cellphones for communicating locally. On the way I bought a big stuffed monkey at a Sanrio-type store. (I like to hug something when I sleep. At home I have a big cow named Milton, but I couldn't bring him with me.) I felt very Japanese carrying it around with me all over Chengdu. So if we didn't have enough people staring at us already for being Westerners, my purchase increased that at least two fold.

I bought a Nokia phone at Trustmart. (Yes, we went back). This involved going to the electronics department and getting a piece of paper with a barcode, going downstairs to pay, walking back around to the entrance, going back to the electronics department to get the phone and then leaving through the grocery store. Three of us got the same phone, because it was the cheapest one available.

At the west gate of the University we found a man that Professor Youtz is friends with. He sells SIM and phone cards. He is very friendly and laughs a lot, but his Sichuan accent is very strong so it is difficult for us to understand him. Luckily, Kristiana was there to translate. She has taken five years of Chinese and has a lot of friends from Sichuan. But still, it was difficult for her to understand him. We all eventually got what we needed-- SIM cards for under ten dollars.

By this time our feet and legs were heavy. We were all yawning and our stomachs were grumbling. Many of us have colds, including me. We found a restaurant quick, and Kristiana ordered us rice, fried rice, mapo dofu, and an eggplant dish. It was all very good. The spices cleared out my sinuses. I was very thankful for the roll of tissue all of the restaurants around here keep on the tables. Afterwards, we felt much better. Cara, Clare, and I took a taxi back to the dorm.

I tried to do my laundry in the dorm's washing machines, but the buttons all had Chinese on them, of course. So I had to ask a resident attendant in the dorm for help. She got it to work for me and told me it would be done in forty minutes. But when I came back it was all just sitting in a puddle of water. I could not convince the machine to drain. There are no drying machines. I squeezed everything out and hung it from our clothesline, and now it is raining in our bedroom. I spread out extra blankets underneath to protect the wooden floor, but it has already soaked through. At least I can fall asleep to the calming sound of water dripping on everything.

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