Tuesday April 12, 2011

I awoke and began the morning routine of boiling eggs, making tea, and making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I looked over work for today, and watched the segment of the movie we were studying again as a re-read vocabulary. Then I went to class. Oh class! I will not miss you when I am freed of you.

I was, to say the very least, very tired from my adventures on the previous night. I needed some way to get better sleep, some way to keep the Grand Harbinger from having such an erratic sleep schedule. I pondered these thoughts while I repeated grammar structures and fidgeted in my chair. The little wooden seats make my rear end go numb after a little while, and the act of sitting in class, in the little midget chairs, is most disagreeable.

The weather has warmed over the past few days, and today’s warmth was followed by a thick layer of smog sitting over the city. Visibility was probably at a half-mile. The effect of the smog is a little chilling, and gives an eerie light to Beijing. My barometer said that today was too smoggy to be outside very much, unless one wants to sacrifice one’s lungs, and I consequently spent the majority of the day in hermetically sealed rooms.

After debate and discussion class, I went over to the Chengdu restaurant right outside the West Gate with Luke. We both ordered roof food, and I ordered hot and spicy soup. Dear readers, I don’t know if this is a verifiable trend in China, but on both occasions that I have ordered hot and spicy soup in China, they have been less than comestible. Today, I ate the soup out of spite. I would not let that bowl of hot and spicy soup go to waste. I do have good news, however. The chemical and industrial cleaner taste that the hot and spicy soup initially gives you fades with time.

I returned to the room and read a little from The World is Flat. The book almost put me to sleep, but I resisted the urge to fall into that trap. I decided to watch a movie, as that would keep me awake and give me some time to “gather my strength.” I have been on a dystopian movie kick as of late. I love dystopian novels, and dystopian movies, when they are done well, do an equally good job of presenting the watcher with a vague sense of dread at the approaching future and instilling in the watcher a sense of duty to do his or her part from keeping such a dystopia from occurring. The only down side to that scenario is that the majority of dystopian movies are horribly done. Take, for instance, the film Battlefield Earth. I would encourage you, dear readers, to watch that movie on a day that you doubt your own intelligence. This movie will convince you of your prowess in intellect and critical thinking.

After the film ended in a series of explosions and the realization of a crappy love story against the backdrop of the violent destruction of an oppressive alien race, I went to Bally and ran.

I came back and played guitar.

Supper with Wes and Hannah was good. We ate Mala Tang, and talked of the end of the program. Hannah has been really stressed with the work; she had only studied Chinese for 6 months before joining the 2^nd year program here. As far as stress goes, Wes was not much better than she. They will do good to graduate from the program.

Studying. Bedtime.