Things I'm thankful for...

This week Americans around the world celebrated Thanksgiving.  My celebration did not include the traditional turkey, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, or pumpkin pie, but there is still plenty for me to be thankful for.  So here's a list of just a few of them.

1. I'm thankful for the many friends I've made here in Shenyang, both Chinese and otherwise.  In particular, I'm thankful that many of them attended the same Thanksgiving dinner of Peking Roast Duck (hey, at least it's a bird) on Thursday.  I expected that I would know the majority of the 130 people in attendance, but it turned out to be a lot of Chinese people I didn't know.  Furthermore, the organizers tried to have us sit randomly so we would have to get to know new people at our tables.  That's a great idea in theory, but on a day like Thanksgiving, I was certainly thankful to have three of my favorite people here also sitting at my table.

2. I'm thankful for the occasional opportunity to eat Western food.  Last week, G & WT invited me over to eat spaghetti.  Real spaghetti.  Mmm.  And we topped it off with real chocolate pudding.  Yeah, I'm thankful for microwavable recipes of chocolate pudding, too. 

3.  I'm thankful for the opportunity to buy relatively inexpensive clothes here to fend off the cold.  Because it is really cold.  Last weekend I successfully bought a nice red ski coat, which the lady assured me would be warm enough all winter.  I was less thrilled with the lady at that market who pretended to not understand my Chinese, just to try to rip me off, but I refused to buy anything from her and found others who were much friendlier.  (When I walked away from that lady, I heard her tell her coworker in Chinese, "Wow, her Chinese was actually pretty good!")  Also, I'm thankful for the Chinese invention of really really thick nylons.  Superbly thick.  Basically, they're pants but designed to look like nylons.  So right now I can wear them with a skirt to go to fellowship.  Of course, in the worst of winter I won't be doing that, but I'm thankful to have the option right now.  And I'm thankful that option only cost me 20 kuai to buy… about $2.50.

4. I'm thankful for fun winter activities.  My most recent adventures have included a trip to the "sports center" of Shenyang, where you can buy all variety of sporting gear from the real name brands.  The story of how and why I got there is a bit bizarre, but it worked out.  Two weeks ago, the girl I tutor on Saturdays and I wandered around a nearby store, simply to give us something entertaining to do as we practiced English.  As we passed the athletic gear, I simply asked about where someone would buy ice skates if they would happen to want them.  Apparently that got translated in her mind to me really really wanting to buy ice skates.  So the following week, our outing was to the sports center to find me some ice skates.  I'm thankful, for one, that the ice skates only cost me 95 kuai (since I couldn't very well get out of buying them after she had gone through so much work for me).  I'm also thankful, though, for the option of ice skating this winter.  I actually went today for the first time, and remembered just how much fun ice skating is.  Now I just need to convince some friends of mine that it's fun and that they should get some ice skates, too. 

5. I'm thankful for Chinese families who welcome me into their houses.  Today, the girl I tutor invited me to her house to eat Hot Pot with her family.  Her family is from Dalian, an ocean town, so they had lots of seafood in the hot pot.  Wow, I like shrimp done that way.  And even oysters aren't too bad when cooked in the hot pot.  But better than the food was the fact that I could interact with a Chinese family, see how they live, and even practice my Chinese a bit.

6. I'm thankful for the occasional random opportunity that comes up that I could never have anticipated or expected.  This past week, I had a girl approach me – in English – saying that she is a journalist for a magazine and wanted to interview me.  The following day, we got together and I learned a lot of interesting things from her.  And I believe this is one way that I will be able to improve my networking opportunities here.  Yeah, I'm thankful for that.

7. I'm thankful for all the fun activities that I have going on every day that prevent me from writing any more on this blog.  Like right now.  There is certainly plenty more I'm thankful for, but I have to go… I have dinner plans.

Warning: This post has no theme

Apparently juzi have dropped in price.  Remember a week ago when I bought 5 kuai worth of this tangerine-type fruit, and surprisingly went home with more than 20?  Today my 5 kuai turned into 50 juzi.  Oops.  That's gonna take me a while to eat.

My other new favorite fruit to eat here is something I just discovered: dragon eyes.  (Seriously, that's the name.)  If you've ever eaten a lychee, you'd understand why I like these dragon eyes.  They are very similar, except that the outer peel is thin, smooth(esque), and light brown.  Okay, so from the outside they don't look anything alike.  But inside, they both have that juicy translucent white fruit around a big smooth pit.  Mmm.

The Japanese claim to be a homogenous people.  The Chinese have never claimed such a thing, since officially there are 56 ethnic groups across this vast, diverse country.  Understanding that, can anyone explain to me why every Chinese person gets their hair cut on the same day?  Really.  It's a holiday.  And to make it even more official, it's even based on the lunar calendar!  So, everybody mark your 2009 calendars... the second day of the second month on the lunar calendar we have to all go get our hair cut.  (If only I knew when that day will be...)

Speaking of hair, let me just say that it is incredibly strange to get more compliments on my hair on the days that I don't wash it than on the days I do.  Creepy.  In the U.S., if I don't wash my hair on a specific day, people just think it looks greasy and gross (which is what I think).  But apparently here it's the preferable style.  I get more compliments those days.  But I won't complain; it means those mornings I get no hot water in my room (or even no water at all, which is even more exciting) I don't have to be too self-conscious going out.  But note to self: don't forget to revert back to washing your hair every day when you get back to the States.  Greasy hair is not okay there.

One of my English classes on Monday was telling me that they often play soccer matches against the other classes here at LiaoDa.  Despite the ridiculously cold weather, they apparently play at 8:00 a.m.  That turned out to be great timing for me, though, because I got to go watch them for a few minutes Tuesday morning before heading to my Chinese class at 8:30.  Can I just say, it was so much fun to have an entire soccer team stop in the middle of a game to wave and say hi to me!  I think it made their day that I showed up to support them, even if it was for only a few minutes.

Yesterday was marvelous.  A Korean friend of mine asked me recently if she could give my number to her Chinese friend who wanted to meet an American.  Of course I said yes, that I'd be willing to meet him, even if I might not have time to tutor him or whatever.  So anyway, yesterday we met up.  I'm not entirely sure why he wanted to meet me, because I had imagined it was to practice his English.  Turns out we ended up spending 2 full hours talking (with a second Chinese guy there as well), but 95% of the conversation was in Chinese.  Sweet!  It was awesome to be able to practice with interesting native speakers.  The only down side was that some of the things they talked about, I really really wished I could have understood better.  They were giving me their perspectives on certain issues in international relations and politics, as well as on various cultural differences between the East and the West.  While I understood enough to follow along generally, I really wanted to understand fully.  Oh, to speak this language fluently!

Scared of winter

Shenyang is cold. Ridiculously cold. Turns out learning that Shenyang is the same latitude as Grand Rapids, MI (where I did my undergraduate studies) was not a beneficial thing for my mental preparation for winter.  Shenyang is much colder than Grand Rapids. 

 

For starters, I probably wore long underwear in Grand Rapids four or five times a winter... and those four or five times corresponded exactly with the four or five times I went out for extended periods of time to go ice skating or sledding.  (Sure, I went sledding more than that.  But I didn't always wear the long underwear when I went.)  Shenyang?  I tried to wait as long as possible before putting on the long underwear... and I got all the way to the second week of October.  Seriously.  Don't think I've been wearing it every day since, because I certainly haven't, but by now I'm wearing it for at least part of most days.  Today I even thought about wearing two pairs at once.  I'm going to hold off on that as long as possible, but I'm sure it's going to happen before the winter passes.

 

Secondly, coats.  I bought a nice black pea coat in GR my first year there, for all of $9.  (What a great purchase, by the way... nine bucks for five winters?  Can't beat that!)  Although I had another coat in GR, I managed most of the time with just the pea coat.  And in DC this past year?  I never wore another one.  But I can't even count the number of people in Shenyang who have looked at this pea coat with astonishment, greatly concerned that I might think I could possibly get away with this coat for the winter.  Many have said it is already not enough for me, that I should be wearing a warmer coat.  Note to self: go to the market sometime this week to pick up a warmer coat.

 

I have this marvelous perk on my cell phone right now (one of those 3 month free trials that tries to get you hooked so that you start paying for the service after that).  Every day or two I get the weather report via text message. Granted, it's all written in Chinese, but impressively I can actually read the weather report without a problem.  At least as long as there's nothing totally bizarre in it.  So the message this afternoon says that tomorrow's high will be -5 C and the low will be -15.  (For you Fahrenheit fans out there, that comes out to a range of +5 to +23. That's chilly.) Yikes.  But what's even scarier than those numbers is the realization that until 24 hours ago, we were hardly hitting temperatures below freezing... and I was already freezing back then! 

 

So the temperature by the numbers might not seem all that much different - at least so far - than winters in GR, but somehow the cold is much more chilling.  Three factors come to mind: First, I spend much more time outside here.  For example, when I have classes in the evenings, I walk half an hour to the school.  Which means I walk half an hour home at 9:00 at night, too.  Second, even inside is not very warm. There is technically something known as "heat" here, but if that makes you think of what we have in the U.S., you're wrong.  It helps, but not that much.  It's still quite chilly inside.  Thankfully, I have a south-facing window, which I think actually helps more than the heat.  Finally, every Shenyang person I've talked to about the cold has mentioned that the cold here is a very dry cold, which makes it feel so much worse.  It also makes my skin very dry...

 

So that's my thoughts on the cold in Shenyang, at least so far.  But I would be remiss if I did not tell you about what happened yesterday: it snowed!  Now don't get too excited; I didn't actually see snow falling from the sky.  However, I know it snowed.  Here's my story.

 

After fellowship yesterday evening, a friend and I went out to go bowling.  Bowling is a preferable sport in winter, in my opinion, because it's indoors.  So we were certainly cold as we arrived at the bowling alley, but when we entered the weather was quite clear.  Several hours later, as we walked out, we commented to each other that it must have rained since the ground was all wet.  Strange.  But it was not raining at that point in time, so we grabbed a taxi and headed off.  Ten minutes later, we both saw it: a car driving next to us covered in snow. "Where on earth did that car come from that it has snow on it?"  Yes, I really asked that question.  Perhaps even more embarrassingly, neither of us really thought anything of it except that it was bizarre.  Until we got off at Middle Street and started walking up to a restaurant for dinner.  The benches and signs dusted with snow there made us realize we had been totally wrong.  It had not rained at all, but it had snowed.

 

Seriously, a snow covered car did not give it away to me.  That's embarrassing. 

Nuts & Fruits

I think I ate 6 juzi (the tangerine type fruit) yesterday, and I've already eaten three this morning.  Is that a problem? 

 

In other news concerning food, let me just say that hazelnuts are amazing!  I have found a wholesale shop that sells nuts, which tend to be fairly expensive around here.  One of their specialties is hazelnuts.  Although I've always loved the hazelnut flavor (think Nutella), I've never actually eaten a hazelnut before.  I definitely had to buy half a jin of them after they had me taste one!  (My only problem now is figuring out how to crack the shell on the ones that aren't already cracked.  I don't have a nutcracker here, nor do I think I could find one if I wanted to.  So far my teeth have worked out the best of anything.)

 

After finishing my classes last night, I stopped by Tesco (the supermarket) on my way home.  I was superbly excited to learn that it is actually possible to buy lemons and avocadoes there!　The lemons were basically two for 14 kuai, which isn't terrible for a fruit that is hard to get.  (To give some context to that, I could but about 16 bananas for the same price, or 60 juzi.  It would also be a reasonable amount for a very good Chinese meal for one in a restaurant.)  On the other hand, the avocadoes were 51 kuai per jin.  Ouch.  (A jin is 500 grams.  I'm not exactly sure how that relates back to avocadoes, because I've never actually weighed an avocado before.  But I normally buy peanuts for 8 kuai per jin and the hazelnuts, a real specialty, were 40 kuai per jin.) So needless to say, the guacamole will occur only on rare occasion.

 

Now for a story unrelated to food.  Yesterday my friend in the dorms decided he wanted to buy his own washing machine to keep in his bathroom.  Technically there are washers in the dorm, but for the seven floors there are only 4 washers.  And of those four usually only two work.  For a while none of them did.  Right.  So obviously the washers are not the most convenient thing around here, so I understand that this friend of mine - who will be here for another 3 years - wants something more convenient.  I had the afternoon free yesterday, so he and I went off in search of a small washer.  It was so entertaining! Instead of going to the major stores that would carry new ones, we found the "used appliances alley" nearby and set out to find a used washer that would suit his needs.  Turns out there wasn't one, so we'll have to go to the main store afterall, but I'm still glad we started in the alley.  How often do you get to see an alley full of old washers, refrigerators, toilets, freezers, etc, all for sale?  Or have fun using your Chinese with the alley salesmen who have possibly never had a foreign customer before?　

 

On another interesting note about costs here, the prices we were quoted for the washers were around 200 or 300 kuai.  That's only 2 or 3 kg of avocadoes!　(Or 7 drinks at Starbucks.)

 

Internet & insults

My goal this week was to attend every single one of my Chinese classes.  This goal has gotten quite a variety of reactions from those I've told, from "don't you usually attend all your classes?" to "why on earth would you actually want to attend them all?"  Almost daily my own reaction to the Chinese courses here sways from one extreme to the other.  But to briefly answer both of those questions, for any of you who are wanting to ask, I usually attend 4 of the 5 days in a week because it is surprisingly draining to spend 17.5 hours in class in a foreign language and managed to study every night on top of that.  So my sanity has occasionally required that I miss a few hours. But obviously, my purpose for being here this semester is to learn Chinese, and a Chinese language class is a logical place to spend my time in order to try to achieve that goal.  Hence my wanting to attend every class this week.

 

Now I just have to say, it's not my fault that I am falling short on that goal this week!  Turns out I will not personally be in every one of my Chinese classes, but does it count anyway since my books were in all of them?  Here's what happened... Wednesday morning I faithfully got up and went to class.  All of you are aware, I believe, of my lack of internet in my dorm, which is starting to really drive me nuts. So two of my friends from the dorm - also without internet - joined me during the last 10 minute break (before the final 45 minute class) to go bring up the issue again with our head teacher.  Her office is just two floors below my classroom, and I often go see her during the break with no problem.  Not this time.

 

Just imagine this.  Our teacher was upset to hear we were still having this problem, so she called the head office for the dormitory.  (She's the head of student affairs for the foreign students.)  There was a significant amount of yelling - all in Chinese, of course.  Then she called another office - the network office - and there was more yelling.  She turned to us again and asked us to wait with her for the top people of those two offices to each come join us in her office to discuss the matter with the appropriate people (since she has more clout with us sitting there, of course).  And this was when I realized I would not be making it back to my class.

 

The two other bosses showed up, and there was even more yelling.  It's really entertaining to watch Chinese people argue.  I also figured it was okay that I was missing class, since I was having lots of fun practicing my tingli (listening comprehension) with all the excitement in that room.  From what I picked up, most of the yelling was centered on casting responsibility onto other offices and refusing to accept another office's authority to tell them what to do.  I was amazed at how little coordination and cooperation there was!  But, somehow things must always calm down.  For these three bosses, the solution was coffee.  Three coffees were ordered, and as soon as they arrived the yelling all but stopped.  Who knew coffee had so much power? 

 

The conversation moved more productively from there, and after nearly an hour in that office they finally decided they could have someone come to our rooms to check the problem.  Yes.  That was the solution.  Seems to me it shouldn't take so much time, so much yelling, and so much money spent on coffee to get such a simple thing done, but who am I to say how things should be run here?  And I won't complain.  As promised, the gentlemen from the network office came to our rooms that afternoon to check out the problems. 

 

Problem solved?  Unfortunately, no.  The others' have internet again, because they apparently had a fairly simple problem.  Mine, however, is not fixed and will not be fixed.  Because all of this took place in Chinese, I'm not entirely sure what the actual problem is, but I was told it was a "very serious and very old problem" that is not specific to my room but affects a large portion of the dorm.  And when I asked if they would fix it, they responded "meiyou banfa" ("there's nothing we can do").  Hmm.  I don't really believe that... there clearly is a way to provide internet in every room of the dorm if they really wanted to.  But as much as I tried to use my limited Chinese to argue that point, they weren't moved to do anything.  And I didn't have any hot water to make coffee to try convincing them. 

 

I was impressed with my communication skills, however, when the gentlemen gave me a few options of what I could do myself for internet.  DSL is apparently an option, as is something through the cell phone companies that is put directly onto my computer, but both cost a decent chunk of change.  So we'll see.  For now, my friend has internet again, so I'll just use his. (Which, by the way, was the first suggestion the gentlemen had for me.)

 

In other news, I have learned several interesting things recently.  First, China has a fairly extensive use of solar power, at least compared to that in the U.S.  Many houses and buildings here have solar panels that are used to heat water for showering.  According to one of my students, the system only  costs about RMB2000-3000 ($300-450) to install, which is quite cheap when considering how much money will be saved in the long term.   

 

The second interesting thing I learned is that the number 8 is actually not a traditionally favored number in China.  Nowadays, eight is a lucky number because the pronunciation is similar to that of "get rich" (which is a desirable thing around here).  However, I just learned that in traditional Chinese thought (before the concept of getting rich was widespread among the people), eight was an unlucky number.  The reason is still slightly unclear to me, but it has to do with the way the digit is written - everything centers on one point.  

 

Other interesting bits of information related to numbers: Never call someone "250" because it is apparently a terrible insult.  You should also never call a women "three-eight."  The more-or-less equivalent for a male would be to say that he has a green hat... which apparently means that his wife has slept with another man.  (Okay, I don't think calling a woman "three-eight" means her husband has slept with another girl; I think it means something more like she's easy.  But I'm not quite sure.  Either way, I don't plan on using it.) 

 

That's all the interesting tidbits I have for today.  I have more English classes tomorrow, so perhaps there is more to come.  But I will leave you with this: wholesale fruit markets are amazing.  I have to walk right by one on my way to/from the school I'm at in the evenings, so I stopped today to pick up some juzi (something like a tangerine - delicious!).  I asked for 5 kuai of them, which is less than $1.  To my surprise, I came home with more than twenty juzi!  Gotta love cheap healthy food!    

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...

One sketchy night

I just had one of the best days and one of the sketchiest nights of my life.  Okay, that might be exaggerating a little, but at least now you're interested. :)

Every Saturday afternoon I tutor a high school girl in English.  Why I went and committed all my Saturdays to this, I'm not sure, but so far it's been fine.  The girl speaks English incredibly well, so we mostly just sit around chatting or studying math for the SAT II.  (Thanks to my mom's help, I have the privilege of teaching her matrices.)  Yesterday the girl asked to meet a little later than usual, and then decided to invite me to her house for dinner!  What an awesome opportunity!  She lives with her parents and her aunt, and her male cousin lives with them during the weekends (when he doesn't stay at his boarding school).  Of course, the food was incredible, but even more exciting was simply being able to see how a Chinese family interacts.  And the fact that most of them actually don't speak English meant that I got to do some practicing, too.  Sweet! 

I felt bad having to rush dinner with the family, but before I knew I would be doing that, I had already agreed to meet up with someone else for the evening.  All the foreign students here keep telling me that I'm too friendly and know far too many people.  The fact that I got together last night with an out-of-town friend (from a city I've never even been to) might prove them right.  Might. 

So my friend lives about an hour and a half from Shenyang, but comes relatively frequently to take classes on the weekends.  Whenever he comes to town, he calls me up so we can do something.  Last night, I thought we were just going out to get drinks.  Boy, was I wrong! 

We went with two of his classmates, one black gentleman from Senegal who I already knew from the dorm, and one rich Chinese guy from a different city about an hour away.  On a side note, I recommend making friends with rich people any time you go somewhere knew.  It's convenient to have rich friends.  The rich Chinese guy from last night has a car, so we all got in and went to a bar I had never been to before.  Turns out it's the best Western food in Shenyang!  Seriously, we had steak.  Dang.  So we hung around there for a while and then met two other people who we invited to join us to go to KTV - Chinese karaoke.  If the only karaoke you've ever done was in the U.S., you seriously don't know what karaoke can be.  Here, you rent a room just for your own group, with couches and your own karaoke machine.  Of course, you have to order snacks and drinks as well, but I don't think most Chinese people would be willing to sing karaoke without a little alcohol.  So the group of six of us had some food, some drinks, and a lot of fun singing and dancing together. 

At 2 a.m. the KTV closes, so obviously we had to go.  To my surprise, though, the original group of four of us didn't go back to school.  No, no, we went to the "shower place."  This was seriously one of the most bizarre experiences of my life.  Not having any idea what we were doing, speaking only some Chinese, and being after 2 a.m... yeah, it was interesting.  The first thing you do in this place is go shower.  Obviously, the males and females don't shower together, but that meant that I was separated from the three guys I arrived with - and left to my own devices to figure out the "shower place."  Turns out trying to communicate with a Chinese lady while standing naked is a little bit awkward.  But I successfully showered, and then put on some clothes they provided to go upstairs and meet back up with the guys.  (I only failed at finding a comb to use on my hair after washing it.  Eh, oh well.)

Upstairs, we were in a large room filled with recliners.  Since it was already so late when we arrived, a lot of the recliners were already being used by sleeping people (mostly males).  So we took four recliners next to each other in the back row, and sat back to relax.  Soon enough, along came three attractive Chinese ladies and one attractive Chinese man.  You probably figured out already that the male was for me.  And we got foot massages.  Now here is a question I actually want an answer to: why on earth do we not have foot massages like this in the U.S.?  Amazing!  After spending a good long time massaging our feet, the masseuses actually then massaged our entire legs.  It's marvelous.  The only slight down-side is that all four of our masseuses actually wanted to talk with me, since I was the random white girl who showed up, but even that was fun.  Good practice once again.  (Actually, did I mention that the rich guy hardly speaks English?  So there was a lot of Chinese going around all night.  It was fine until the guy was slurring his words due to the alcohol, but then I just talked with the others in English.) 

After the massages, I expected we would be finishing up and heading home.  Nope.  Wrong again.  We actually slept there, in those recliners.  What a strange experience!  Sleeping in a room full of Chinese men (and one Senegalese).  But it was fun.  My friend who had initially invited me out was in the recliner next to mine, so we chatted anytime neither of us were sleeping... which was actually quite often, since apparently every grown Chinese man snores.   That doesn't really surprise me, though, given how many years they've had of breathing in this kind of air. 

About 7:30 a.m., my friend and I got up and ate some breakfast while the rich guy and the Senegalese kept sleeping.  Eventually they woke up as well and we set off.  On the way out, it was back to the awkward talking-to-Chinese-ladies-while-naked situation, but it went much smoother the second time around. 

Now I arrived back to campus at 9:00 a.m., and I just have to laugh when I think about my evening.  What a bizarre set of experiences, but how exciting to have seen so much of the inside of Chinese life in the last 24 hours!  And possibly the best part of it all?  I didn't have to pay a single fen (i.e. Chinese penny).  Like I said, making rich friends is the way to go!