A little break

The last couple days have been far less hectic than the last week. Each morning we've had a lecture given to us on Chinese culture and media. It's been interesting, but it's hard to pay attention for 3 hours when someone is translating the whole lecture.

Monday night we had a reception with our group and the group of UNC students (20) that are staying in our same complex. It was really fun, we got to try a lot of food- Duck! I know my parents would be very surprised at how many things I've tried! After the reception we went with the 2 grad students who are kind of our "babysitters" to a bar. I found my first jager bomb, but surprisingly that wasn't the highlight of my night! Outside the bar this kid has a shirt on and it said buffalo wild wings and under that it said Strongsville. I freak out and it turns out they were a group of students from OU that are studying over here for the summer. It was really cool and just insane how small a world it is. The bar ended up being a dance club and it felt like Wes's wedding all over again. One of the guys joke that the bar should have paid me because when we got there we were the only ones on the dance floor- after about 2 hours I had gotten about 25 chinese people to dance with us. I, of course, was there the latest with 2 of the other guys in my group.

This morning after class we just hung out in the room for a while to relax then had an adventure on the subway. Matt, a guy on the trip, had been exploring for a while yesterday with his roommate and Allie and I took him with us so he could teach us how to use it. We ended up at an area that looked like a small time square and then walked to the "night market". The night market is a road of street venders of the most insane foods ever. We (Matt got it and we all tried it) got Squid and Beef and who knows what else I ate tonight. They were closing up about 20 min. after we got there and so we will definitely have to go back. We ended the night walking to Tiananmen Square, partly because we wanted to see it at night and partly because we were trying to find a taxi that wasn't trying to rip off tourists. Because where we were was such a tourist trap there were a lot of fake taxis, one tried to make us pay a flat fare of 150 when our total cost to get back was 41. So we made it back and everything ended up ok.

The next two days we have free days. Tomorrow morning we are going to go to the zoo to see all the panda's. So now I'm off to bed and will write again soon! Hope all is well!