Another week already gone by again?

Things are beginning to move faster now and I am able to move around freely now and explore more of the city. The week itself was not very exciting, I have found a few new places to eat at which are very good, including a place that sells the "baozi soup" things that I saw in Shanghai. Friday was a celebration for Roberts' wife's birthday and so everyone (11 of us) went to KTV which is the karaoke place that we have gone to before. We stayed there for a long time singing songs (including Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, and Haddaway's What Is Love) and just hanging out. Afterwards Ashley lost her cellphone and we were unable to relocate it afterwards. After coming back it was about 12:30am and I had to go to the office. I got to the office and cleaned up my computer and picked up some of my Gundam (think of a model car that you assemble, except this is a space craft that is shaped slightly like a person and is based on an anime(cartoon) that I watched as a kid) and I then realized I hadn't really eaten dinner. I talked to Will and he said the street vendor was open at this point of nite. The street vendor is a group of 2-3 people who set up shop near our school late at night every day and dont open up until about 11:30pm and stay up extremely late. Their food is reliable and cheap, Will ate there a lot last semester so its not a "shady store". I got some noodles, beef, egg, and a few vegetables cooked(5RMB, so about 90cents USD) and headed back to the college to sleep.
Saturday was a bit of a long day which consisted of going to a tea garden (leaving around 8:30/9:00) with an English club that Li is friends with and they allowed us to go to the garden and pick tea leaves which would be cooked and turned into... tea leaves for tea. this sounds funny, but the truth is that making tea leaves actually takes hours and hours to do. This area happens to do it by hand (though they have technology which can do it for you) and each step (out of 8 i think) can take around 2 hours. After walking around a very scenic area we got to go pick tea leaves for about 20 minutes and then we brought our tea leaves down the hill to give to the workers to begin cooking. the problem with this part though was that the leaves required half a day to dry. so they had a pre-prepared batch for us that had been dried, and another batch that had already been cooked (when i say cook, i really mean slowly dried out over a long period of time... you cant really cook the leaves because they would burn then). We were then allowed to test the taste of the tea to see how it tasted. the tea is a green tea that is very light in flavor and tastes pretty good, though it its not amazing. I say this part because we soon came to find out that the price of 1jin (maybe about a kilogram or so... im not exactly sure... it seems like the size of a pound plus a little bit) can be atleast 2500RMB (alot of USD for a little bit of tea).
We then headed back to Hangzhou and then Ashley and I went to a korean barbeque place that we have been to once before with the rest of the group, and got there at 8:30pm to eat (I no longer pay attention to time... I just eat when im hungry). We sat down and went to the buffet area and saw that there was almost no food there, all the meats, vegetables, and pre-cooked food were gone! We weren't sure what happened and I began to wonder if they closed soon. we sat down and cooked a couple of carrots on our skillet style table (the center has a circle of metal with hot coals underneath) and waited for them to hopefully refill the food. After a few minutes a waitress came up to us and asked (in English) "can you help me?". I said "yes..." and waited for her reply, but then she looked like she was waiting for me and asked "what do you want?".
At this point I realized that she had meant to say "can I help you" and so I asked (in Chinese) for some beef and then paused and asked her if she knew what Chicken was (I didn't know the Chinese for it). She said something and sounded slightly confused but walked away after saying ok. very soon she came back with two plates that weren't extremely large, but they were of good size. one had a lot of beef on it, and the other had (luckily) chicken. The beef looked incredibly good and had zero fat on all of it, the chicken also looked very good. we thanked the waitress and began to cook our food. the beef and chicken were both as good as they looked and soon after the waitress came back and asked if we wanted some fish. she asked if she was saying it right and said the word for fish in Chinese, which I replied "Correct(in Chinese), fish(in English)". She also asked us if we wanted fruit and We said yes. She brought back 3 plates, two had oranges, apples, and bananas on it. While the third plate had about 5 fish on it, they were not only whole but had the fins, tail, and head (eyes included) on it. the waitress gave us a demonstration of how to wrap the fish in foil and cook it and to turn it over after a certain amount of time. Ashley and I decided to try it and it was actually very good, I used the chopsticks to pull the skin off (sorry if your get queasy easily) and allow myself to just eat the meat without getting either skin or bones. the fish itself tasted very good so we put a couple more on to eat later on. We also asked the waiter what time they closed at which happened to be 9pm (explaining why there was no food and why people began to leave). Ashley and I quickly finished the rest of our food and went back to campus. The drive to find the place was slightly hard because LiShumin wrote down the wrong address for us and we gave it to a taxi driver which took us in the complete wrong way from where we needed to go. After getting to a completely unknown area and taking a taxi back, Ashley and I took the bus to her work where she knows the place is near and just walked a few blocks to find it. The place cost 50RMB which equates to less than 9USD, which is an incredibly good price for a very nice restaurant that allows you to cook your own food. had we arrived earlier we could have stayed for as long as we wanted and eaten a lot more, but we had our fill for the night and were very happy about how everything went.
Sunday was a very relaxed day, I finished building my Gundam and decided to climb the hill next to our campus with Ashley. The hill was very refreshing and a took a few pictures which I will try to upload here when I can, It is an amazing view at the top because looking at our campus you can see a tiny looking area that contains our campus and a large street in front of it which has another small hill at the end of it (they are "technically" mountains... however I dont think of them as that tall, i dont know the height but its 725 steps to the top). When you turn around from this standpoint you can see the other side of the city which stretches so far that you can't "see" it (haha smog). at the top of this hill you are easily a hundred or so feet above any ove the highest buildings that you can see and it is very nice to be able to look around at the whole area around us. Ashley and I went down the other side of the hill and wound up super close to campus (we expected to need a taxi to go back). We headed back and hung around campus for a while and relaxed.
Today has just been classes, relaxing and then going to McDonalds and wandering around with Alex W. and now I have completed business class and am preparing to head back to my room to finish some homework and then sleep. This week may not be very eventful but this weekend is a holiday so we have a 3 day weekend and its possible Ashley and I will travel. I will be sure to update here when I have completed any travelling or anything.
I hope everything is going well in the US, I apologize if anything I write may be out of place or have bad grammar, I usually write my blogs quickly and don't check my spelling or grammar, so if something doesn't make sense at any point just comment and I will further explain. also if someone has a question about anything or wants a more detailed story, just ask.

trip to shanghai/week of school

This weekend the school ("central's" group) went to Shanghai on Saturday and Sunday to visit a few different places. Starting from Saturday we got up and left at about 7 and took our 2 hour drive to Shanghai. When we first got to Shanghai we went to what is called Yu garden, it is a garden area that has a lot of little shops (though they are very overpriced and hard to bargain with). but after walking around for a while we arrived at the garden itself, which has a lot of old chinese style houses and artifact styled things. the garden was very nice and i took a few pictures while walking around. After the garden the group went to a city planning museum and got to view the plans that were made for the Shanghai expo which had many building plans from each countries contributed plans. this was very interesting and inclued a HUGE overview of Shanghai. To put this into perspective, think of a miniature planning of a single building, and then take that times the number of buildings in Shanghai and you have the 4th floor (i think 4th... maybe 3rd) of this building. after this we went to eat at a restaurant that had a lazy susan. We ordered a lot of food and much of it tasted very good, including sweet and sour pork. After eating here we went to a street that had a lot of shops and clothing style stores that had a lot of lights and neon signs. the stores did not look very interesting but we did get to eat "soup baozi". they are basically the bread and meat buns with some soup inside it. the authentic ones are made with only soup inside that you are supposed to drink with a straw, but ours were kind of a mix and had meat and soup inside. we then went to a very nice massage place and i got a massage for an hour (it was MUCH better than the one near school because it didnt hurt at all). after this we went to bed (after some problems which i shouldnt really talk about because we may or may not have had to do some law dodging things to get a hotel) at a very nice hotel which had breakfast in the morning. after eating breakfast (and drinking 2 large glasses of real milk, which is hard to find). we drove to a museum of science which was about 5 floors high and extremely large with a lot of different sciences, including things from space down to the process of digestion that occurs in the body. everything had english translations which was very nice. After the museum we went to an aquarium which was incredibly large and included the passages where you walked under water (under glass of course) to see the fish, and what was even more interesting was an escalator with a tube of glass over it and as you went down you would slowly go under the water and be able to view all of the fish around you. After spending a lot of time in the aquarium we went to a shopping mall and walked around for a while before stopping at a food place at the bottom floor and had a special dish that was a soup of rice noodles. the other interesting thing about this dish was that they bring out about 15 small dishes of food that had everything from small slices of fish to sausage, to squid and tiny shrimp. the soup came out so hot that even though the dishes were raw, it would cook it over time and allow it to be eaten (though it could be eaten raw). after finally doing all of this we headed back to Hangzhou to finish homework and go to sleep.
Last week I had classes every day, and nothing new happened, though on thursday and friday before going to Shanghai we had some cool events that happened. on thursday we got to go hiking up a mountain that is right behind our school and i got some good pictures taken. the hike up the mountain took about 700 steps (they had counters) up and then another 700 down after walking around the top for a while. on friday we were supposed to go boating but it was too windy so we ended up not going. instead we went to a korean restaurant which was very nice, it cost about 50yuan but what you got was a table and a hot plate with large coals beneath it. we then went to what can be considered a buffet of meat and vegetables (health codes dont exist here luckily, so tasty places like this can exist) where you pile up what you want on a plate and then go and cook it yourself. It is very nice and has a lot of good meats, when you are done with your plate you are able to go back and get more as many times as you want.

this was a quick over view of what I did this weekend, and this week seems that it will be a normal week without many events besides classes. tonight though i went with some of my classmates and my teacher to a place that translates to "grandmas kitchen" where we had many different dishes that the teacher ordered for us. a lot of it was very strange food, such as jellyfish, but overall it was pretty good.

A few days passed I suppose

So things have been moving fairly quickly lately, I have not done anything new and I have also not taken any photos lately. The past few days were pretty crummy weather wise, it was windy and rainy a lot of the time and there wasn't a whole lot to do. I was placed in level 1.5 chinese class, however today I got switched into level 2 chinese which is where I wanted to be. I hope that the new class will be somewhat more challenging so I will be able to learn more. The new class schedule allows me to sleep in a little while on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, but on Tuesday I have 3 classes at one time which last for 4.5 hours in total. Along with wandering somewhat farther each day I am starting an internship next week, the internship basically makes me a consultant for a few people who were accepted to (I'm assuming somewhat) prestigous schools in the U.S. I have to ask them specific questions and work with helping them to better understand the system they will be confronted with in the U.S. I am not entirely sure what exactly I am doing though, but once I find out I will post more. I also decided to learn how to solve a rubiks cube by memorizing the algorithms for solving it, as of now I can fairly easily solve the bottom, and two layers. The final layer is a little bit more difficult and requires memorizing quite a few algorithms, but I hope by the end of the week I will have it down. Besides that, I do not yet have a lot of homework to do for classes so I mainly hang out with the group of Central friends I have and go to different restaurants.
The language barrier has become a lot less lately, I am remember a lot of Chinese that I forgot and am slowly working my way up to understanding everyone much better. A few days ago I went to a market that I have been to before with Zoe and Ashley, they bought a few cloth type items but I couldn't find anything to buy. Afterwards I came back to the college for my history class and learned about a game called Weiqi, which is kind of like the game where you have dots and connect them with lines but a lot larger in scale. Yesterday was very windy and cold, in fact it was so cold that it snowed.

3 days of free days

So the past few days have not been very eventful, or had many things worth posting about. We have had (about) 3 days of nothing to do so many of us just wandered close by campus and ate at some random places. The food has still been very good, including going to a new restaurant by the front gate and picking out some random noodle/soup dishes to eat. The one I ordered had shrimp in it, which of course included the shell, feet, head, and antenna's. The soup was still pretty good, but I mainly ate the noodles and shrimp (it had some other questionable things in it... I think fish).

Yesterday I had to get up fairly early to take my oral and written placement test to see what level Chinese i would be taking. I did very well on the oral part, and the written part was pretty complicated but I was able to understand most of what i was reading. At this point I hope to be in level 2, or possibly 2.5 which should challenge me fairly well. After that I relaxed for the day, watched a movie and some shows and walked around nearby for a little while.

Today we left from the office at 10 and went to a tea house close by, the tea house is sort of a mix between a lounge and a buffet eatery. the lounge part is that you can go and sit in a room and relax for as long as you want, the buffet part is that you pay a fixed fee per person and get to eat snack type foods. the reason its a tea house though is because after arriving you get a menu which is a few pages long and contains only tea to order, which is free (basically) and they take out the tea for everyone to try. Ashley, Alex, Robert, and I stayed until about 1:30 or 2 before heading back the the dorm, while everyone else stayed until around 4:30. After walking back in pouring rain, I went to my room and changed pants (as I had no hood or umbrella with me when we left since it wasn't raining so bad) before going to grab some food and go to the office.

That is a short version of what I have done the past few days, it has been relaxing and enjoyable to not have to do so much but also boring at the same time. I have found myself eating easily 4 or more meals a day (but still spending a max of 15USD for an entire day). I enjoy eating the simple things that are nearby, including a Korean restaurant, a Muslim, a Japanese, and of course Chinese restaurant. The Korean place has spicy food mainly, but includes some things such as tuna sushi, and other various kinds of sushi. The Muslim place serves mainly noodle dishes and runs about 10yuan per dish (1.4USD I think), this place is extremely good and fills me up very easily. The Japanese restaurant has some very expensive "western" dishes including the "super deluxe DX mega cheeseburger''.... the translations are hilarious but it is still very very good. the cheeseburgers run about 28+yuan, (4.4USD and up) which is comparatively expensive but still pretty cheap for a cheeseburger that has....(wait for it).... meat, lettuce, onions, some mayonnaise type sauce, tomatoes, green stuff, some kind of bbq sauce, and also a fried egg. the sandwhich was about 8 inches in height, and was very tasty though not very western. The Chinese places are similar to "Pac-Mans" in the style of food they serve, and technically the Chinese restaurants include Pac-Mans for places that I eat. tomorrow I have a lecture to attend to, but not really anything else to do. I hope it isn't rainy as it is somewhat harder to explore far away when its so dreary outside, so I hope that its soon not raining.