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.