Today, I got up early to study for the test before it began. The midterm was pretty rough, and incredibly long. With that being said, I felt like I knew most of the material on the test and that I did fairly well. After I finished taking the midterm, I died. It was as if the midterm was the bone and sinew keeping my upright and motivated throughout the week, and after it was done and given to the teachers, I immediately morphed into a less motivated and gelatinous version of my prior self. But the midterm was done!
Around noon, my 4th year classmates and I went to Chinese Table, where we ate some atrocious food at a hotel near the West Gate. When we walked into the restaurant, I immediately knew that the food was going to be bad. I have developed a 6th sense for this sort of thing since I’ve been in China, which is critical. Knowing where to eat can mean the difference in being bedridden for a week with food poisoning and hating this country, or being able to survive. These are things that you too can use to determine when not to eat at a Chinese restaurant:
1 – Pastel colors for decorations: If you ever walk into a restaurant that uses pastel colored tablecloths, the best thing that you can do is go back to whence you came. The worst colors include pastel green and pastel pink, and lesser colors to watch out for include light yellow and sky blue. I think that the relationship between these two is a decorative preference with people that make bad food. Safe colors include white, gold, red, dark blue etc.
2 – A lack of food smell in the restaurant: This means that the kitchen is farther from the dining room itself, which also means that the restaurant wasn’t meant to be a restaurant, and was changed to be a restaurant at a later time. This also means that the food simply doesn’t smell every good.
3 – The only customers are businessmen. This means that no women choose to go to the restaurant because the food is bad, and also that the men are choosing to go to the restaurant because of social prestige and not for the food.
4 – The restaurant “looks classy”: This may be the most telling indication that the food is going to be bad for your health and sanity. I don’t understand the connection here, but the only places that I’ve had problems with my health after eating Chinese food (notwithstanding institutional cafeterias) are the “classier” Chinese restaurants. It may have something to do with the way that the cooks prepare the food, or that they have greater incentives to slightly undercook the food as opposed to overcook it, but that is simply postulation. The best places to eat are the ones that look horrible from the outside, and look like the floor hasn’t been mopped in a week.
After the lovely meal with the students and professors, I went on a quest for my package. I have received a hint – travel to West Gate and talk to the people at the other international dorm. I hear tales of packages being sent to the wrong dorm, and as I had nothing better to go off of for finding this package, I decided that it was worth a shot. When I got there, however, I found that the office workers were taking what I like to call the eternal Chinese lunch break, lasting from a little before noon to 2:30 in the afternoon. How does anything get accomplished in this country?! I was met with naught but closed doors at the international dorm, and I returned dejected.
I came back to the room with the intention of reading, or doing something similarly productive. However, I was on the verge of falling asleep when I got back to the room. Something had to be done. Unless I am sick, I have a strict policy against taking naps in the afternoon. When I do take naps, it destroys my sleep schedule for the evening, and my sleep schedule is already fragile in the ACC dorms. Thus, I watched Back to the Future to stay awake.
Around 3:00, I made further inquiries into the state of the package. They knew nothing about where the package was, is, or has yet to be. I told them my plight, and they agreed to help me by calling the troll that lives in the mailroom near my dorm, and finding out what he knows. A package came to the dorm that seems to fit my description (a box from America) on February 16th, 2011. This package was then handled by yet another mail-troll who took the package to the building where I take classes. Her name is PengJu and she only works at extremely inconvenient hours of the day, and on many days does not even come to work. She is, in reality, the only kind of person that I want to handle my package as it arrives from the States.
Then, I came back to the dorm room and watched the rest of the Sherlock Holmes movie. I had no plans for the evening, but there was a party going on at the West Pizza for one of the girls in the program’s birthday. I really did not want to go to said party, and I was procrastinating about trying to devise a means to not attend…
Wes and Hannah saved the day! They asked me to go to an international fellowship with other internationals living in Beijing. The fellowship was very much what I expected it to be: a little sketchy, awkward…
Then we all came back to the dorm and played some Majiang with Trevor, Hannah, Wes, Joy and Marianne. Then, it was bedtime.
I’ll write soon!
Love,
Jamey
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