Thursday January 27th, 2011

Today, I’m sad to report that there is precious little to report. I woke up and went to class, and was done with my first three classes at 11. I didn’t have another class until 1:40 in the afternoon, so I went over to Bally and got my workout on. Then I went back to class, where I met with my independent project advisor. We discussed an article that she printed off for me about Chinese investment in Africa, and we talked over a few of the new vocabulary words that the text presented. The information that I’m learning on this topic is so different than what I’ve seen in the States – but I’ll save discussion of that until tomorrow.

I took lunch after my one-on-one class at a Muslin restaurant at the West Gate. I’d forgotten two things about Muslim restaurants from the last time I was here. 1- They serve knife noodles, which is a delicious noodle dish with huge wheat noodles. If you were to put six or seven spaghetti noodles together, you would probably have the equivalent of one knife noodle. 2- Muslim restaurants serve you a lot of food. Thus, I had a moment of joy in the restaurants when I saw knife noodles on the menu, and I ordered the large bowl of noodles. In the end, I may have eaten half of the numerous noodles.

Then, I spent a lazy rest of the afternoon checking my emails and preparing my resumé for another round of businesses. A recent Croft graduate is going to help me find an internship through some of his contacts here in China. I thought that my calligraphy class started at 4 that afternoon, but it actually began at 3:00. Imagine that. I’m batting .300 for the after class activities this week.

So I retired to my room once again. Around 7:30, some of us decided to make a trip to the faithful ChengDu Roast Fish Restaurant. To my disappointment, our usual waitress wasn’t there, and I had to be satisfied with a boring waitress from the countryside. We made a meal of dumplings, eggplant, 1000-year-old eggs, spring rolls, and rice. Then, we all trudged back to the dorm in the freezing weather and studied for the rest of the night. I went over the review sheet, determined that I knew the lesson, and went to bed pretty early.

That is it. I haven’t had any great Chinese cultural revelations today. In fact, it’s been a fairly normal day – whatever normal is in this crazy country.

I’ll write soon!

Jamey