Sweatshirts and racial profiling, hip hop and picnics

I finally got a Beijing University sweatshirt! I've been wanting one for a while but they never had one that was a zip-up AND had Beijing Daxue on it in characters AND was my size and in a color I liked. But yesterday Eva and I were in Wu-Mei checking out the Beida stuff, and they had sweatshirts that met all of the above qualifications, except they were a little bit too big for us, but we got them anyway. Hen hao! And when we wore them back in our dorm, everybody on the hall wanted one. So I'm pretty sure that eventually like all of CIEE will have the same navy track-jacket sweatshirts, and we'll be like some awesome foreign sports team. Yeahhhh. Somebody in my Kouyu class even asked where I got my sweatshirt. It's totally the best one that they have. But the best part about it is that when I wore it to meet my tutor last night, she informed me that the Chinese characters on the shirt are the handwriting of none other than dear ol' Chairman Mao. Fabulous! If you're interested, his handwriting is kind of messy. Whatever, Chairman Mao. Your "xue" is all kinds of silly-looking.

The other fabulous thing that happened yesterday was I got racial-profiled. Some chick walked up to me in the dining hall and gave me a piece of paper, smiled and walked away. When I looked at it it turned out to be an advertisement for a Chinese tutor, including such awesomeness as "I hope to share my learning experience with you and earn some pocket."
Yep. I was totally ordering food in Chinese in a competent enough way, but obviously I need a tutor because I am a white person! Hen hao!

BTW, my tutor is totally awesome. We mostly just chat during our tutoring time, and it is pretty random...I tried to explain the Duckie Maniac Club to her, and she thought it was the bestestest thing ever and totally cute. We talked about a cappella groups and I learned that some group from Pennsylvania (which is Pan sha fan ya or something equally silly in Chinese)
performed on campus last fall, which I thought was totally awesome, and we sang songs and talked about the one child policy. Hen hao!

So tonight a whole bunch of CIEE peeps went to the first meeting of the Beida Hip-Hop Club, which some of them were in last semester and they said it was really fun. They want a lot of people in the club because there is some huge performance coming up soon with famous Chinese celebrity people (Yao Ming is the only one I'd recognize) and they're supposed to have a 60-person dance team. Except when we got there, there were like 5 Chinese people, and then all of the CIEE posse trooped in. There were maybe a dozen of us, and the Chinese people were totally surprised/amused by our numbers. We schmoozed and introduced ourselves for a little while, and then Julie (who was in Hip-Hop Club last semester) explained that they wanted us to freestyle but were too embarrassed to ask. Ahaha. We all sat down and a teeny little Chinese girl got up and broke out some crazy amazing dance moves. It was insane. Then another dude got up and danced, and some other folks, but most of our posse was pretty unwilling. Except then we wanted to see the dude dance again because he was really good, and he was like no no and we were like if you dance we'll all dance. Then everybody got up and grooved in a group a little bit but it kind of turned into a huge circle and then they were like heyy go freestyle in the middle! So basically, Eva and I busted out some freestyle hip-hop action together in front of a bunch of Chinese people. It was fabulous. Hip-Hop Club definitely has the ghettoest Asians around this place. Feichang hao!

When we all got back to our dorm afterwards, I did a little homework, and I was hungry, and then Eva walked by with a jar of peanut butter and some bread and honey and we were like SNACK TIME and it turned into a picnic out by the elevators with all sorts of sandwich spreads and mangoes and marshmallow pies and other foods and a bunch of people from our hall came out and we all sat on a blanket on the ground and had a little late-night peanut-butter-and-sweetened-condensed-milk sammich picnic. And, P.S., sweetened condensed milk is ridiculously awesome. And in Wu-Mei, you can buy it in a convenient squeeze tube. Rock. Annnnnnnd now I should finish my homework, because I have class un less than 8 hours. Ooch. Hen hao!