First Week of Classes

The last couple days have been quite nice.  The smog has seemed to be a bit less and the sun has been strong.  The temperature has been about 35 +/- 10 degrees.  Not many clouds and it's quite enjoyable.  I've been keeping busy in the last couple days focusing on school.  As i have mentioned before the course load for this semester is much higher than I was expecting.  There is a lot of reading to be done, Chinese words to study, and I haven't started to look at my purdue based mechanical engineering course yet.  I fear that the workload will be interfering with the opportunities to go and experience the Chinese culture.

The food in China seems to leave a lot of american students partially filled but not satisfied.  The cafeteria food is lacking a lot of the density found in american dishes.  It is also quite rare to eat a meal with a drink other than hot tea.  In the cafeteria to get a drink you must go to a separate area where I have yet to encounter a line -- something quite rare in China as you might imagine.  It's starting to catch on that it's a good idea to keep a bottle of water at all times within reach.

Last night was an alright time.  Due to the dictation in Chinese language this morning, many people decided to stay in and get some studying done.  For dinner, no on was quite happy with the dining hall experience at yesterday's lunch - so we figure dinner (same food) wouldn't be much better.  A group of about 10 of us went to a Japanese Noodle place across the street.  I had a large bowl of noodles with like roast beef and parmesan cheese on top - about 25 yuan ($4), pretty expensive.  After dinner we all went over to McD's and got some ice cream.  I also ordered an apple pie -- which they didn't have.  She pointed to the yellow stuff on the ice cream and I didn't understand.  She then held up a Pineapple Pie and I was thinking .. yeah okay.  It was pretty much the same as apple, just sweeter.  2 pies was 7 yuan and an ice cream was 2.5 yuan - About $1.40 total.  We split the pies and it was a good time.

Today has been a hard day so far.  Thursdays is a full day of Chinese from 930-12 and 1-415.  It's a lot of Chinese and a lot of time in the same room with the same teacher.  The first half of the day went by kinda slow.  Lunch was actually pretty good today in the dining court.  It was a meatball of something, with a side of rice, and a pile of corn / carrots / chicken / beans.  I also picked up a few chicken nugget type of things.  The nuggets were cold - but it didn't take away from how awesome my non-carb filled lunch was.  It was about 8 yuan for lunch, so not much more than 1 usd.

Theres a group of people tonight who are going to head to the Bund - the river front area.  It's currently under construction for the world expo - but I think I'll go anyways.  I need to get some reading done before I get to sleep tonight though!

Thats all for now

JBiber