The Princess of Belgium

Not a lot of exciting things happened to me this week...I ate, slept, went to class, and spent as much time napping and as little time studying as I can get away with. But as of Tuesday night, I am a mere two degrees of separation from the princess of Belgium. I had just come out of meeting with my tutor at 8:30 and was powerwalking towards the area of campus where all the eating places are, thinking only of how I might obtain some delicious baozi in the quickest manner possible, when a young guy with a bicycle stopped me outside the noodle place. He asked me what was the best place for foreign students to live on campus. I'm easy to profile, but I don't mind. At Beida, foreign students live in the Shao Yuan complex, which has 9 buildings. I told him that Shao Yuan 9 (where I live) was the best, although that wasn't saying a whole lot, and why did he want to know? He replied that he was from Belgium and although not a current student, he had studied at Beida 2 years previous, and now the princess of Belgium wanted to study at Beida in the fall and was looking into the details of doing so, so he was supposed to ask around about the best place to live. I said that I knew Belgium was a small country, but was it so small that everybody knew the princess? No, in fact, he had received an invitation to a banquet for the princess when he had returned to Belgium from China, and had initially thought it was a joke, but apparently the princess had found out somehow that he went to Beida and wanted to ask him things about it. The princess currently goes to some very expensive school in France, but I can only imagine what it would be like for her to come to Beijing...it's a little bit different here. Sure, Shao Yuan 9 is the nicest dorm on campus, and is technically a hotel with maids and non-communal bathrooms and whatnot, but it's still a really cheap, really ghetto little hotel by American standards, with hard tile floors and drafty windows and furniture that has been beat up by semester upon semester of college students. The princess of Belgium! I suggested that maybe the princess should look into living off-campus if she's looking for something really nice. We had a funny little conversation, and Pierre (for that was his name) declared that my American style of talking was highly entertaining (the Americans here are unfazed by the way I talk, but Chinese people and other foreigners think I'm hilarious for some reason) and that we should go sit down somewhere and chat and have some beers or something. I suggested baozi, because I was still jonesing for some baozi-licious goodness, so we went to the baozi place to chill. Pierre insisted on paying for my baozi, and I was particularly glad that we were getting baozi because I always feel awkward when other people pay for me, but baozi are the cheapest food ever (one American dollar will buy you 16 baozi) so it was all good. Then we talked a lot about international relations, and what Americans think of the Chinese, and what Belgians think about America (they're mainly indifferent to it was the impression that I got), and nationalism in various countries. Apparently Belgians have almost no nationalistic feelings because Belgian was just kind of created as a silly little buffer country between Germany and France, so it doesn't have its own language or really much of a national culture (except waffles, maybe? I didn't ask about that), hence Belgians aren't all that patriotic. I had never thought about that. We talked for a while, but then I had to leave to pick up my laundry because the laundry place closed at 10:30 and I was wearing my last pair of clean underwear, so we exchanged phone numbers, and I'm invited to a party sometime in a couple weeks, and now my chain of connection to the princess of Belgium has been significantly shortened. And I have clean clothes. It was a highly productive evening.

I haven't really done much else lately except try to figure out what the heck I want to do this summer...way back in the day I had wanted to go with my phonetics professor's research team to Tibet, but the other members of the team never delivered a verdict on that as far as I can tell, and then I wanted to go teach English in Africa, but then when I was looking at programs I discovered one where you could get a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate at the same time, except it wasn't offered anywhere in Africa, so then I was like well maybe I will go to Thailand then, and I actually sent in the application for that one, but that one's also comparatively quite expensive, and my dad asked if there were any comparable Christian organizations, and I hadn't found any, but I emailed our friend in Singapore who has friends who do volunteer work in Thailand, so I'm waiting to hear about that, but I'm wondering if maybe I should forget about getting certified this summer (I can do that in the US if I have to) and go on a cheaper program, and then I found an organization that offers programs in Thailand and Africa as well as Nepal (which would be totally cool) that is a lot more affordable, but at this point I don't even know anymore. I have to call Continental to see if I can switch my flight, because currently I'm scheduled to leave June 10th, but my program actually ends a few weeks before the real semester here ends, and I decided I wanted to stay until the very end, which is the end of June, so I might switch my flight to then, but if my program starts very soon after that, I might not come home at all in June and just fly out of Beijing to wherever I go in the summer and return to the States in mid-August. Whew. But I can't decide anything about airplane flights until I figure out what I'm doing for the summer, so everything is up in the air. The only thing I'm relatively certain about is that I'm not coming home June 10th, unless it's totally impossible to switch my flight.

The other thing is that I don't know anymore what I'm doing for spring break...I really wanted to go to Tibet but Jacqui can't go anymore because her doctor told her it would be a really bad idea with asthma, and the other people who were going to go with her are going to Xinjiang province now, and the guys who wanted to go to Tibet to Mt. Everest are going to Inner Mongolia now I think, and I still would really want to go to Tibet but it wouldn't be a good idea to go alone, and I don't know anybody else who still wants to go (it's pretty expensive). So I might go to as of yet undetermined, slightly obscure, cheaper places in China with Jacqui. But there are no plans. I have no definite plans for anything, except that right now I'm going to karaoke with the English Corner, so this post is over. Hen hao!