Xi'an

Got back from Xian much as I arrived--at an unusual hour. We got in at 5 a.m., checked into a hotel and had about 1-1/2 hour to rest before we started our sightseeing. Went to see some hot springs, the Terracotta Warriors, the Big Goose Pagoda, and the Great Mosque. The hot springs were where some emperor used to bathe, not very interesting. But it's als where the Xi'an Incident occurred. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist party, was kidnapped from his field headquarters outside Xi'an by essentially a warlord and forced into a truce with the Communists. Bullet holes remain and period furniture fills the small rooms of the field headquarters. More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi'an_Incident.

The rest was the same old same old. In our free time, I got to eat a lot of the famous street food, although much of the time I wasn't sure why it is famous. Rou jia mou, often referred to as a Chinese hamburger and supposedly is Xinjiang specialty, is actually much better in Nanjing. Did have some awesome spicy crayfish, so now I'm starting to realize that the worse something looks, often the better it tastes.

The first weekend trip is also used as an opportunity to bond with all the people we're just meeting. That meant going out at night, in this case to karaoke (KTV). And that I was completely exhausted. Arriving back in Nanjing at 11 p.m. Sunday night, by plane, we only spent one real night in the hotel.

Class

Class is proving hard enough that I'm holding off on getting a job. I should be able to keep up in real A ban (not A2 ban I was placed into), so I should learn a lot this semester. Trying to focus on my tones, as they are my weakest point.