Starbucks. Gotta love it.

Life in a foreign country is fabulous. Everyone should try it sometime. (Okay, maybe not everyone, but anyone who is fairly flexible and likes adventure.) Keeping this blog up-to-date has been much harder than I anticipated, not because I have too little to talk about, but because I have too many adventures and too little time on the internet to write about them! Today I had a few hours free, so I decided to have a new adventure here in Shenyang: find the bus that will take me to the nearest Starbucks, where I can get real decaf coffee and free wireless internet! It's been a marvelous adventure... a 1 kuai bus ride, an actual conversation with a friendly English-speaking Chinese lad, and a vanilla latte later, I'm having a great night and I'm updating all of you on the status of life in Shenyang. Also... (drumroll, please) uploading pictures! Check out this link: http://picasaweb.google.com/vrieland/Autumn#

Let's see, where to start. Last week Tuesday, two of my classmates invited me to their apartment for dinner. It's a Korean couple, although the guy speaks very good English. (It was an interesting combination of English, Chinese, and Korean around the apartment that night!) We had some absolutely delicious Korean food for dinner, and I made chocolate pudding for dessert. (Woo-hoo for finding powdered cocoa here!) Of course, eating Korean food, using multiple languages to communicate, and learning something about another culture is fun, but the fellowship that night was especially good. They will definitely continue to be my friends.

Here's another story about a Korean. Different girl. I met this girl maybe a month and a half ago at the Sunday meeting I go to, although we're both students at LiaoDa. Her spoken English is quite limited, although she understands a lot that others say, but her Chinese is relatively equivalent to mine (we're in the same level class, but she speaks with more fluency than I do). On Saturday night, I was walking up the stairs to my dorm room when I ran into this girl on the steps. We stopped to talk, and ended up having an incredibly meaningful conversation basically entirely in Chinese. She and I are very similar in many many ways, so we could understand each other even when our words were quite limited. We shared about our families and our upbringings, and we shared about our reasons for being in China and our goals for the future. And we even shared about how we might be able to do some specific thinking in the upward direction for each other. What a marvelous thing!

Wow, it's fun to go back and think through the past week. It makes me realize just how blessed it has been! The people I meet up with on Sunday have also established regular gatherings on Wednesday evenings at the various universities around Shenyang. The LiaoDa group is the smallest of them, but it's definitely a good group. This week, however, I was asked to visit one of the other universities and speak with them. It was particularly exciting to see who hangs out at that one (a lot fewer black or white faces around there...) and to be a part of it for a week.

Speaking of last Wednesday, some important stuff was going on in the US that day. (Remember, there's a time difference... it was 12:00 noon here on Wednesday when the polls closed in the western timezone on Tuesday.) As a good American, I decided to skip my Chinese classes that morning to watch the election results come in. Thankfully, Al Jazeera in English was covering the election starting at 6:00 a.m. here (which was obviously earlier than I started watching). So I hung out in my friend's room and had fun watching the events. Let me tell you, though, that it was a really interesting experience to watch the first (partially) black man get elected to be President of the United States while sitting next to several Africans, including a Kenyan. I seriously think I was the least invested person in the room, even though I was the only American!

Sometimes adventures don't go quite as planned. Okay, let's be honest, that's what adventures are... they aren't supposed to go as planned. But if that's the case, Saturday was really an adventure! A friend of mine from the Sunday fellowship invited me to go out to the countryside. Since I have not really ever been to a Chinese countryside, it seemed like a good thing to do. Besides, this is the friend who has a motorbike... and riding a motorbike out to the countryside really sounded like fun! So despite the cold weather, we set off about 10:30 in the morning in his "car" to go to the countryside. (On a side note, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that this friend of mine has managed to find not one, but two, helmets here in China. That must be hard to do, since I hardly ever see a Chinese person wearing a helmet. But not only was a helmet a good thing for the safety factor, it was also a whole lot warmer to have my whole head protected from the wind!)

The first thing we did was go ride by the Olympic Stadium. Now, for those of you who are confused because you didn't think I lived in Beijing, you're right. I'm not in Beijing. But the city of Shenyang played host for the soccer matches during the Olympics. So there's an Olympic stadium here, too. It was fun to go see it, and especially to ride around that area of town. When I was in Shenyang two years ago (for those of you who don't know, I was in Shenyang two years ago...), I was living very close to where the stadium currently stands. The entire area has changed completely! I could hardly find my way around at all, and not just because I tend to be a bit directionally-challenged.

From there, the plan was to take a certain road out to the countryside, a road that my friend knows goes to the countryside. Unfortunately, the entirety of China is under construction, including this road. So we asked some security guys how we could go, and we asked some random ladies walking on the sidewalk, and we asked some guy on another motorbike, and we asked some construction workers... Unfortunately, the fear of "losing face" drives most Chinese people to give an answer to one's questions whether or not they know the answer. So everyone we asked told us something different. So we more or less rode around in circles, lost around Shenyang, until we got hungry. Then we found a random restaurant and went in to fill our tummies, warm up, and recharge our battery. (Seriously, battery-powered transportation! It rocks!) Three hours later, we finally left the restaurant and headed off again... finally figuring out where we were but still having no idea how to get from there to the countryside. So we did some more wandering, stopped a couple places, and then ate dinner at a different restaurant. It definitely turned into a fun day, but despite the best of intentions we never actually made it out to see the famed Chinese countryside.

Other fun experiences of the week included going bowling with two Chinese ladies on Thursday; coming home to find a party going on in the dorm on Friday night, which meant I could have fun for the evening without braving the cold or spending any money; and being adventurous in trying some new street food and visiting some new places, although some of those adventures turned out better than others. Sunday night was particularly exciting with the discovery of a new western-food restaurant that serves - wait for it - lasagna! Good lasagna, too! Actually, it hardly resembles the lasagna I grew up on, but it has noodles, tomato sauce, and meat. It was tasty. They also served real pizza, instead of the nasty Chinese-style pizza of most "western" places around here. And best of all, it wasn't too terribly expensive. (The 38 kuai for the lasagna is a lot compared to the 6-8 kuai meals I often eat at the Chinese restaurants, but compared to the 33 kuai I just spent on a drink at Starbucks, it seems reasonable. I was actually just talking today with my friend G about how our concept of money is so profoundly different here than it is when we're back home. Which things are expensive and which are cheap is something I'm still adjusting to.)

And now I'm sitting in Starbucks, thinking about all these various adventures from the past week but feeling like I could be right back in the U.S. right now. Except, of course, that everyone walking by outside is Chinese and the people behind me are speaking a language I only pretend to understand...