So, Monday was a holiday in China so all classes were cancelled, so we got to just hang out and walk around the city that day. four of us bought phones so we could stay in contact during the summer and during our internships around the city. It was quite an ordeal just because the place we went to was really crowded because of the holiday, and the whole different languages thing didnt help either, but we got phones at least. after that ordeal, we walked across the street and got some starbucks, which was probably just a bit more expensive than starbucks in the states, but it was good to ahve a solid cup of coffee again. Outside, in the plaza of this mall area, there was a band playing some jazzy blues music so we sat down and started to watch them play and chilling out, listening to the music. they were pretty good, and we noticed this random guy in a really nice three piece suit and fedora was standing off to the stage, and we thought he was like their manager, but like 10 minutes later he got up and started belting out some U2 and Led Zeppelin, which wasn’t too bad. We did some further walking around that night and did some clothes buying for one of the guys in our group because he was running out of shirts, and then we had some pretty good japanese ramen at a mall.

TUESDAY
The usual 3.5 hours of Chinese class in the morning followed by some lunch at the canteen on campus. Unfortunately, I didnt look closer at what I was about to order and got apparently a dish that Chinese people love, its basically like tofu and eel cut in like slices right thru the main bone. So, I basically just ate the tofu and rice it came on top of and just left the eel alone because overall its not that great and just way too many little bones to even be worthwhile. After taht, we came to our Intercultural Communication class, and then a few of us went off campus right after to go buy SIM cards for our phones. In China, basically you pick your number and you just buy minutes for your SIM card and it is totally separate from your phone and there are no plans to buy, its mainly just buy your SIM card with minutes and texts and then get a phone to stick it in, and voila! So, I now have a working phone for China which should come in handy over the next 8 weeks. We were all hungry for dinner and so we decided to hit up the food court of the mall we were in, Jusco, which is Japanese based, and they had beef bowl in the food court which I’ve been craving since I left Japan because I had it all the time over there. Only problem iwth the food court is that you have to buy a separate card to buy stuff within the food court, so we had to get that, whcih was fairly annoying, but oh well, we are here for 10 weeks, I’m sure we’ll eat there again. So, I had a kimchi beef bowl which was delicious and made me super happy. We basically just hung around the rest of the night on campus.

TODAY WEDNESDAY
So today’s 3.5 hours of Chinese today was a little different and much more fun. It was SONG DAY!! We had this 24 year old guy local guy who spoke really great english come in and teach us two older but popular Chinese songs. We would listen to it on the CD a few times first and then we would sing it with him playing on his guitar. It ended up being pretty fun, and the guy, Jackie, was pretty cool, and was saying “I don’t want this to be a teacher-student kind of thing, we should be able to hang out and everything” so that was interesting, so I don’t know, we might go Karaoke with the guy at some point soon, be we will have him for songs again next wednesday. We then grabbed one of our professors, Randy Kluver, and we all went to lunch at a restaraunt right off campus that has become one of our favorites. We had some eggs, somewhat sweet, mixed with tomatoes and tomato juice, yummy, and then some big green bean pods that are really salty but very good, then we had diced chicken with peanuts, cucumbers and carrots, which was also really good. Good food for lunch! We also explored the north side of campus a bit with Randy and we found another student store, this one much bigger and awesomer including a dry cleaner, yay!!!! I bought a FuWa cell phone dangly (FuWa are the 5 little mascots for the Olympics, I got the green guy) and some coffee for tomorrow since we are heading out to Hong Kong on an 8am flight and leave the dorm at 630am… ugh.
So, with that, I will leave off here to resume the blog after the weekend and the Hong Kong trip. Hope all is well state side!