Finally

Got some things achieved today, the main ones being a) getting my passport back from the Indian Embassy with a nice Indian visa inside and b) eating really wacky street foods at Wangfujing. For all the aggravation I went through trying to get ahold of the Indian Embassy to find out if my visa was ready yet, it was amazingly easy to get. It took, seriously, about 10 seconds. Silly times. I went shopping at Silk Street and got pretty pink presents for people, and made some salespeople seriously unhappy, a reliable sign that you've gotten something for the cheapest allowable. In the evening we went to Wangfujing snack street, and ate lots of weird things, including dog, scorpion, sparrow, snake, and sea mushroom. They were all okay, although everything was fried and overly salty, and it was really hard to get to the edible part of the scorpion through the exoskeleton. Also the vendors were totally the most obnoxious ever, and they spoke English, which is somehow so much more annoying than being hassled in Chinese. One time four of them were simultaneously telling me at the tops of their lungs that I needed to buy some fruit on a stick, and they wouldn't take no for an answer and wouldn't stop yelling no matter what I said, and I finally just turned around and yelled SHUT UP at them, which didn't have much effect, but I felt better. Later I yelled it in Chinese, which was also satisfying. Seriously, they were the most loud and obnoxious vendors ever, even worse than the ones who come out and grab your arm. One of them kept not listening to our order and putting in things we didn't want and being super annoying, and we yelled at him like 3758429758392 times, and at the end he asked for my phone number. Seriously, these guys just did not get it.

New CIEE summer students are here! They seem pretty nice, but they will never be the old CIEE crew. What can ya do. Doesn't matter, I'm leaving on Saturday anyway!