Jamey's Journeys!: January 12th, 2011 (12 PM)

Dear all –

So I’m pretty excited right now about all of the new folks coming to the program! It’s a little strange having people actually living in the dorms here, since I’ve spent the last week living as a ghost in this building. And my roommate is showering now; I can’t really sleep with him jamming around the room.

So I woke up this morning and got moving around 8:15. I talked to Morgan on skype, and then I got ready to move rooms. It took me until about 11 to finally move out, and then I went to my new room. It is so nice, and it is a lot bigger than the ones before this. There are two beds, nice desks, dressers, a fridge, and a place for us to keep food on a little shelf. The bathroom is also a lit bigger than my other one. I’m totally unpacked, and my suitcases are put away, except that I’ll need them for my host family.

After unpacking, I headed over to an Wu Mei, which is a Chinese grocery-department store, a little bit cheaper than Carrefour (but not by much). I picked up some food that I can eat for breakfast, and I got a few snacks to keep in the room. Cristina and Alex needed more stuff than I, and we ended up splitting the cost of laundry supplies, since its unlikely that we’ll use an entire bottle over the course of the semester.

Then, we got Cristina’s stuff from her old university. Both Alex and I were amazed at the sheer amount of stuff that she was able to amass over the course of 4 months. I ended up taking a taxi by myself – with the rest of the car filled with her stuff – and they followed.

After we got back, we started going around the 6^th floor and talking to the people in the program that have arrived over the course of the last day. I’ve met Russ, Nick (both from Seattle), Kaylin (an ABC from NYC), Luke (also from NY), Lillian (from the Boston area), and Vinod (from Los Angeles. He has a pretty fry sense of humor. We sat by each other at dinner and joked the whole time). They all have varying levels of proficiency, some who just started studying Chinese in the past year, and others who studied in high school, but just started taking it again in preparation for this semester. All of the people on the 6^th floor ended up coming over to my room, and we brewed some tea and ate snacks. We talked for quite a while, and at seven we went to a Yunnan restaurant in the neighborhood. It was good, and we stuck to “safe” Chinese food: potato balls, beef curry, eggplant, bok choy, and pineapple rice. It was a pretty good meal.

Then, as I had nothing to do, I walked Vinod and Kaylin down to Carrefour so that they could get necessities, like soap, shampoo, Q-tips, and clothes hangars. That took us over an hour and a half to make the trip, and we got back a little after 10. Then, Cristina, Alex, Kaylin, and I went to check on Elizabeth. She went to the hospital today to check on her persistent cold, and they gave her a strange assortment of Chinese medicine. Evidently, monkey grass is great for coughs. Bet you didn’t know that. Neither did I…

That’s about it for the day! I’ve surprised myself by turning into quite the little social butterfly, but give me a few short days to get back to my old self, haha. All of the people in the program seem very excited to be here, and I do think it’ll be a fun semester, if given naught but the company.

I’ll write soon!

Jamey

PS – The program stuff begins tomorrow!