你看！一个中国人！

你们好！

The food adventures are progressing well; on Tuesday night we successfully navigated the bus system and ended up in the Tibetan quarter, where we found a Tibetan restaurant. We tried the infamous yak butter tea:

...it was, quite honestly, disgusting - though I did try it twice, just to be sure I didn't like it the first time. We also saw a cockroach on the wall, but we tried not to think about it too much. The food was delicious!

After dinner, we browsed through a couple of shops in an alley in the Tibetan quarter; Alex and Duncan almost bought two awesome Chinese shirts while I looked in the absolutely tiny weapons shop across the street. It was chock full of broadswords, a few straight and double straight swords, a handful of pudaos, and a few guandaos. The very suspicious woman who ran the store kept a close eye on Reid and I as I looked around; she then asked me in Chinese if I liked wushu, and I told her I was a fan of Shao Lin and Hung Gar kungfu. She later snapped open a fan (though not a steel one like I have) and I tried to tell her that I had a steel one at home, but she didn't understand me, and stopped me when I tried to take a picture for all of you. Ah well.

We went on to Jin Li street - weeknights are definitely better for visiting than prime time on the weekends. It was much cooler and less crowded, though still quite busy. Unfortunately, the purple jade vendor who I'd hoped to haggle with for a truly awesome buy was gone - his entire stall had been demolished. In only 3 days he had disappeared, and we couldn't find him anywhere else in the area. :( I am super disappointed. I might try to go again this weekend, just to see if he's back.

It was very beautiful at night, though:

In other news, while our Tibetan culture class is picking up again, Mandarin is still insultingly easy and pointless (I am considering sleeping in tomorrow...). I really wish this trip was 3-4 weeks of sightseeing and touring China instead of six weeks of classes with some (albeit awesome) weekend trips. It is still a very worthwhile experience and I am learning and seeing a lot, but I just got through a very tough year of school and am not really in the mood to be a student again right now -- especially since I will not be getting any credit from Carthage for the trip! I kept forgetting during the planning stages that this was not a vacation and that I would actually be attending summer school. Bah!

The days here feel very long - we are still fitting in fun food adventures and side trips, but with two three-hour classes a day, it is difficult for me to keep myself distracted from the part of me that does miss home and friends and familiar things. (That was excessively wordy; I hope it made sense and you can forgive me.) The majority of people I pass on the street stare openly at me; some of them will look away when I meet their eyes only to be caught staring at me again seconds later. Talkative I may be, but I'm an introvert at heart and I like to keep a low profile - which is absolutely impossible to do here.

I've also noticed myself becoming a lot more patriotic (perhaps due in part to the fact that several of the guys in our group are from the South :P ). In my defense, though, it's hard not to be a fan of your home country when you're a foreigner on the other side of the world for the first time, and you're witnessing young children treating the sidewalk as a restroom (!). I have certainly encountered some of the world's most "interesting" smells here, to be sure. I can't wait until we get out into the more rural areas; after my rather lackluster encounters with Minneapolis I have had my fill of cities for awhile, I think, and Chengdu isn't much different from what you'd expect of any city. However, the Sichuan University campus has so many trees that it does feel like a forest at times, which is just awesome. I am definitely looking forward to our rural trips. :)

In other news, I survived my first laundry/hang-dry experience here on Monday night; the incredibly hard bed is actually quite comfortable (except for my hip bone, as I sleep on my side); I also don't think I've gotten ill from the abundance of black mold that rings the bathtub. I do, however, have a strange small rash-type thing that is under my skin around my elbow, but I'm attempting not to be too much of a hypochondriac about it. (If I ignore it, it will go away.)

Ah, let me indulge in one last complaint: everyone* smokes here. If I remember correctly, I am allergic to this, beyond the normal disgust factor. I have had a vague, constant sore throat for the entire trip thus far. It's not just about holding your breath as you pass smokers on the street - we are continuously seated next to tables full of chain smokers in restaurants; we even entered our classroom on Tuesday to find that the previous occupants had been heavy smokers, as evidenced by the full ashtray that still sat on the table. The room had no ventilation and the windows were not open... :( It is an absolutely repulsive and pervasive habit here.

I totally wish I had brought more books with me - namely, American Shaolin. I do not remember how many times I have read that book, but I highly recommend it to anyone with a sense of humor and adventure. Matthew Polly, who took a year off from Yale to find and train at the Shaolin temple in the days before google maps, is an absolutely fantastic and non-PC storyteller, and I could do with his humor and insight on traveling in China right about now. I do distinctly remember, however, one of his tales: he traveled rural China when white people were even more of a shock to the locals than they are now, and got so sick of people pointing at him in the streets and shouting "Look! A laowai!" [impolite term for a foreigner] that he began pointing back and stating loudly, "Look! A Chinese person!"

The weather here has been fairly tolerable lately, though, although air conditioning is definitely saving my life in the classrooms and bedrooms. Apparently July is the rainy season, so we'll see how that goes. I do hope that the weather remains nice for the weekend though - we have several fun excursions planned to museums and temples and such.

That's it for me for tonight - I have 70+ pages to read (and present) for Friday (!). I can hear my group members chatting in the hall - they have congregated just outside my door. (Earplugs time!) I'll leave you with this picture of my lunch of champions: ramen and a surprisingly delicious Chinese snickers bar. Aw yeah.

*Creative license. There are nearly ten million people in this city, though, and smoking is insanely common.