Beijing hen hao!!!!

Oh man it's been crazy times...there was a 14 hour flight, and then the airline losing one of my bags, and meeting lots of other students, and zillions of activities. I didn't get my backpack until last night, because the airline lost it and I had to go through this whole process to get it back and yesterday I went out and bought some of the stuff in my missing bag like razors and soap and almost as soon as I got back from shopping they called to say they had found my bag. I maintain that my buying things caused it to come, just like washing your car makes it rain.

There's been so much silliness in the past few days that I just can't remember it all...I've eaten tons of awesome food and seen even more really silly food items...today I bought "Mexican tomato chicken" flavored potato chips and green-tea-peach cookies. Also I ate jellyfish at lunch. It's a little weird texture but not bad.

Yesterday we took a placement test in the morning, which was really really hard and kind of demoralizing, to the point where I just gave up reading the reading comprehension passages because I was struggling so much and it wasn't helping me figure out the answers anyway...I placed into intermediate I written chinese and beginning II spoken, but I switched down into beginning II written as well once I saw the book. I'm not crazy about being in such a low level, but I think it's where I need to be to not be in over my head. Whatever.

After the test they sent us out in little groups on a scavenger hunt in the city of Beijing. I wasn't thrilled at first, because our tasks seemed really extensive, like finding out all the bus routes from a certain spot and then taking a bus to some shopping center, but it turned out to be all kinds of fun, and I spoke little bits of Chinese to people and it was awesome. We went to Carrefour, which is a French Wal-Mart style store, but of course all the stuff is labeled in Chinese with occasional English, so I had a crazy time buying things. I ended up getting mostly Chinese stuff because the American brands were so much more expensive. My sense of prices is changing rapidly...I'm like ew, 20 kuai, so expensive, even though it's like $2.50 American.

Time for dinner! More updates later! Hen hao!