All Sorts of Silliness

First of all, happy birthday to my two silly little brothers who are now 12 and 17 (ahhh so old)! It is your birthday in China right now even though it's still March 9th in the US, so ha. I didn't get you any presents, but I promise when I come back from China I'll bring you all sorts of silly things. Hen hao!

So I actually went to Wal-Mart again yesterday because Erika and Enrico wanted to go so I went along to show them where it was...I didn't get lost at all this time, but it's still a pretty long walk. My hip joints are allllll kinds of sore this morning.

There were a couple funny things about Wal-Mart that I forgot to mention before. One is that a lot of employees have English names on their nametags in addition to their Chinese ones, and I definitely saw two male employees named "Polly" and "Lori." It was fabulous. The other strange thing about Wal-Mart was the bathroom...it was a pretty good bathroom; they even provided soap and had a totally functional hand dryer, but the best part was that they had self-flush squatty potties. It seems like such a contradiction to me, like a funny combination of Chinese tradition and modern civilization. Silly China. Silly Wal-Mart.

I got more stuff at Wal-Mart, even though I had just been the day before...I got some more candied hawthorne strips (so delicious!) and some hawthorne berry juice and other random things like this doughnut thing that looked like it had brown sugar on top but it was really some random light brown fibrous substance. But the best acquisition of all was CHEESE. They don't have cheese in China. I mean, they do, but Chinese dairy products are generally not to be trusted. My doughnut-thing had Chinese butter on it and it was weeeiiiirrrdd. But magically, in the midst of Wal-Mart, we came upon cheese. And not only cheese, but the most quintessentially American cheese of all: Kraft Singles. The white kind, not even the yellow kind. After wavering over the price (20 kuai seems so expensive even though it's not even $3 American), I decided to spring for it. We had been in major cheese withdrawal. I ate a piece of cheese straight out of the package while waiting for the train at the subway station, and it was fabulous. Totally worth it.

So last night when I got back from Wal-Mart there was almost nobody on my hall, and it seems that they had all gone out to dinner and then to some club, but my roomie came back early because she is sick so we had a quiet little chill night on our hall. For those of you who were wondering, my roommate's name is Quynh (read: Quinn) and she is from Oregon and she is Vietnamese and she's kind of like the Asian answer to Sarah Mastroianni, for those of you who are acquainted with the inimitable Sarah. Quynh is fun and talkative and she was here last semester so her Chinese is a bazillion times awesomer than mine, plus she knows all the ropes already. My roomie is awesome! She plays Chinese music and swears that she's going to get me hooked, and it's true...sometime we will go do karaoke and sing silly Chinese ballads except I don't actually know the words. Whatever! Also we watch this Korean reality show called Full House about two Western girls who live in a house with some members of the Korean boy band Super Junior and they play all these silly games and it's pretty ridiculous. Hen hao!

I feel like I know less about Asian pop culture than like everyone else on this program...about half of the CIEE students are some kind of Asian I think. I feel like I'm starting to be able to distinguish between Chinese and Korean and Japanese people by appearance. Starting to. A couple of people in the program are actually native Japanese/Korean but go to school in America. It's actually harder sometimes for the people who look Asian because the Chinese are less forgiving to them if their Chinese is not perfect. Some people had a hard time getting into a club the other night because they didn't believe they were foreigners at first and it was free admission for foreigners or something. As much as I feel conspicuous here (and I'm sure vendors assume they can make me pay a higher price because I'm a waiguoren), looking different is mostly to my advantage. People stare pretty shamelessly, but they're also willing to help me. The other day in the dining hall a woman came up to me and asked if I needed help ordering...I guess I radiate confusion, even though I did pretty much know what I was doing. Waiguoren hen hao!

We are leaving on a trip for Stone Flower Caves now...doesn't that sound pretty?