The Past Week

As usual, not a lot's been going on besides studying. This past weekend, I just did the usual hanging out thing. Spent one night at this bar with live jazz with most of the people in my program. On Friday, Ping Ping (our program assistant) had a party at her apartment, which was packed because her roommates also invited all of there friends. The over-crowded apartment reminded me of my freshman year, but in a good way. I guess. After that we went to a bar with Salsa dancing, although I admittedly only watched. I possess no actual talent, I have to take a dance class or something when I get back to the U.S. I spent Saturday working at the voice recording job again.

By Sunday morning, I was feeling slightly ill, this feeling I usually get before I get actually sick. No surprise really, everyone in the program has a bad cough, one girl had pink eye last week, another bronchitis, and my roommates been sick on and off for a week, sometimes with a fever. Rather than fight with the same advice I always get from Chinese people, I just went along with it this time. I'm wearing more clothes than I need to keep me warm and drinking only hot water. Might be doing the trick, haven't gotten actually sick yet although I still wake up with a sore throat.

On Sunday, I did go to an all you can eat sushi and teppanyaki restaurant for Shirlene's birthday. It was all you can eat for 150 kuai, so we gorged on steak, shrimp, fish, raw sashimi, etc. Almost gave me a meat coma. I followed up that fine dining experience by going to a place called Taj Mahal which had Indian food and was, surprisingly, actually run by Indian and/or Pakastani people. It was free too since enough of the Chinese roommates went that it counts as a "Target Language Meal" because we presumably spoke Chinese.

Last night, my roommate and I had like an hour long conversation in Chinese after we got on the topic of politics and foreign policy. It started off with how crazy Korean people are, or at least how some of their scholars think the way history went down. Ended up talking about Darfur, Taiwan, Kosovo, Bush, Clinton, Hillary, Iraq, oil, how the U.S. start's too many wars, how Jiang Zemin is a real "piece of shit" for not at least getting really mad about the U.S. plane bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade back in the '90s, how much of a badass Mao was before 1949 and how he screwed stuff up after. It was good, I'm starting to learn how to say all these things and it's funny to learn the Chinese pronunciations for these words which is funny sometimes (ex: Bush is BuShi). It tied in well with the vocab from newspaper articles I've been reading for my one-on-one class about China/Taiwan and most recently an article about Condi meeting with Hu Jintao.

Tomorrow, the program is going to a migrant primary school to volunteer in the afternoon. Pretty much, migrants move to the city's to find work, but they remain pretty much second class citizens, so there kids get second class schools. Each group of us is supposed to teach the kids a song, play a game, do a skit, story, something that is "American." We'll see how that goes, may have to brush up on "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes."

Upon return from that I will leave promptly for Shanghai. On Friday, I have a "talk" with a guy about a magazine where I could possibly get an internship. Kind of hard to say what that will actually be like. Getting my suit coat sleeves shortened for an amazing 15 kuai repair, so that they'll be the right length for when I wear it at the interview and going out.

I'm already getting into minutia, but I'm at a loss for what to write. Still trying to update every week though.