Pictures!

After nearly two hours spent sitting outside (in the snow) with my laptop, connected to the seemingly random wireless internet that exists in a courtyard area in the middle of campus, I have uploaded some pictures from my holidays here in China.  I won't go into details here, since there are captions with the pictures, but the series starts with American Thanksgiving and goes through what I have experienced so far of the Chinese Spring Festival/New Year.  I used to think the Thanksgiving – Christmas – New Year series of holidays in the U.S. made for a nice long holiday season; that's nothing compared to what I have celebrated this year! It's been fun, and I hope you enjoy the pictures. 

 

Here's the link: http://picasaweb.google.com/vrieland/Holidays

 

On a completely unrelated and totally random note, I had a slight mishap with my adventurism today.  Living in a foreign country (where you only sort of know the language) is only fun if you're adventurous, I think, so I try to live by that.  Usually it's great.

 

Recently I've been having fun trying all the different kinds of milk here in China.  (Don't worry, I know there was that little milk situation a few months ago.  I'm pretty sure what I've been drinking is fine.)  Not only does China have regular milk, they have flavored milk as well.  This concept is not surprising in itself, since we have chocolate milk and can make strawberry milk in the U.S., too.  But the varieties here are beyond comparison.  My favorites so far are the walnut flavor and the coffee flavor. 

 

My least favorite? Grape. 

 

That one should never have happened.

 

And unfortunately, in my zeal for adventurism, I just picked up several new varieties I hadn't tried before without looking carefully at what flavor they were.  If I had seen "grape," I wouldn't have gotten it.  I don't even like grape flavor! But wow, grape flavored milk is especially disturbing.

 

Don't worry though; this little incident has not affected my zeal for adventurism too much.  I just bought a new round of milk (actually reading the labels this time), and I'm eager to try the new coconut flavored one. J

 

(And for those of you who think Canada is cool because milk there comes in a bag, just for your information, milk here comes in bags, too.  Individual size bags, which is superbly convenient for being adventurous and trying all sorts of different flavors.)