Roommates

Ni hao!

Here is my roommate, Haiyan (Jane is her English name):

Last night the students took their tongwu (roommates) out to dinner. We picked a dumpling place close to school. This was by far my best meal out here thus far! We had vegetable dumplings, pork dumplings fried and steamed, tofu, chicken of some orangy sort, chicken bone, beef... it was great!

(my favorite is the dish in the upper left hand corner. The hye-roller things are actually flattened tofu with scallions and red bell peppers inside of them. You take that and put the chicken stuff on top of it and voila! haochi! (good food). For 10 people, the bill came out to 160kuai, which is about $25. As you can see, we liked it:

(as you can see, I am sooo archaic with my peace sign. Its all about getting your guns up in China!)

Interestingly, in China one person pays for the whole bill with the understanding that the other people will reciprocate in the future. However, our roommates have learned about (in their words) "going Dutch". I got the bill this time.

Afterwards I went out with some students to the ex-pat district of China where all of the bars and clubs were. I have no idea where all of these white people came from! They were all dressed to the nines like in the states. Although, the thing I have learned is that 9 out of 10 times if I see a white person, they are NOT American... hen you yisi (very interesting). Also, I learned that they party late. Thus, 3am came and went.

Today the students with a handful of Chinese roommates went on a scavenger hunt through Beijing. We had to collect bus/subway tickets, go to a local hospital, learn to fax something, figure out how much a tailor costs, etc...

The scavenger hunt took FOR FOREVER. We were all pretty senile by the 6th hour. And cabbies are so fickel about whether or not they want to take us back to our school. Apparently, our location is too far away from the city center and they oftentimes refuse us. Our group split up and the Chinese roommate convinced his cabbie to take them, our cabbie dropped us on the curb. We ended up crankily taking the subway and walking 20 minutes home after the long day...

Today I was able to communicate better with my roommate and I think things will look up as far as my progress in Chinese. I also talked to the community director about moving from the 150 level to the 200 level (where I belong) and it looks like that I just need to give them the final word and they'll move me!

Thats it. I guess I need to learn to be brief. I just like not having to type this out 20 different times...

Here's a magazine cover I found. I thought it was a little funny: