Seeing Old Friends

On Thursday, September 8, I had two classes, but for both of them the teachers didn't show up. The first one was Chinese Society Behavioral Analysis, with an apparently really famous Chinese sociologist named Zhai Xuewei. I sat next to these two really nice girls who talked to me. Eventually someone came to tell us that the teacher had forgot he had class this week.

The next class was Urban Archeology and Culture with the Chinese archeologist who wrote me a letter of affiliation (aka an invitation from Nanjing University) for my Fulbright application, He Yunao. I went to the wrong building at first and looked everywhere for the classroom, asking every security guard in sight, but by the time I found the classroom, it was dark and nobody was there. Gao Min called a friend to ask about the class, and his friend told him that the class just wasn't meeting this week.

When I met up with my friends for dinner that night, everyone said I had gotten prettier and lost weight. I have a feeling that they were just flattering me (how does one get prettier exactly?), but it was nice anyway. At one point, Ping Ping's husband asked why I wasn't eating much, and I replied that my stomach wasn't used to Chinese food yet.* Gao Min then turned to ask me, "How did you lose weight in the US? I thought everyone got fat when you went to the US. I just don't understand how this is possible." :-/ Ping Ping defended me by saying my life was bitter (辛苦) in the States, that I worked at a grocery store and lived an hour outside of the city, and this was how I lost weight. Afterward, I gave my friends some things I had brought them from the States, a book, some Clinique products, and the cookies and brownies. They said the brownies were good, but I was afraid they had gone bad by that point. My friend John was also excited about the granola bars I brought him.

*Later I realized that I probably shouldn't have said this, and should have just pretended to eat more, as they had gone out to dinner especially to welcome me back to Nanjing, and it was a little rude to say that I didn't eat Chinese food. I was embarrassed. 

On Friday, September 9, I went to lunch with a friend and got business cards made. Check it out:

English side

Chinese side

My friends and I also went to Karoake with some of the new CIEE students:

Gao Min (center) and Xiao Hu (right) sing their hearts out

 On Sunday, September 11, I went shopping with Ting Ting and got a new sweater (it has started getting cold at night) and went to Pizza Hut with her and her boyfriend John. I also invited some friends to get dinner, and I told them ahead of time that Ting Ting didn't speak any English, and they all said it was okay because they all speak Chinese. Then they proceeded to speak in English the entire time at dinner, even when introducing themselves to Ting Ting and asking her questions in English, which really embarrassed her because she didn't understand.

Monday, September 12 was the Mid-Autumn festival, which is a type of moon festival where Chinese people eat moon cakes. Nothing special happened all day, except that there were a few more firecrackers than usual.

Chinese word of the day (new feature on my blog):

词汇 – cihui – literally "word collection" aka vocabulary