Day 14 -- June 7

The morning was a typical morning, though maybe because it was Friday I was extremely tired. After having eaten and chatting with Alyx for a tick, I ended taking a quick nap before class. I went to the last day of the supplemental classes and I’m happy I did. We were practicing shopping language and such. I got to be a shop keeper! For essentially twenty minutes it was chaos of people yelling in broken Mandarin (plus other languages) about food and clothes. My shop was the most popular, I sold everything, Laoshi had to give me more items from other shops. It was pretty cool She kept saying “Number One Seller”. She also announced it to the class at the end, it was a lot of fun.

    After the class I went with Gaki, Misaki, Nick, Jillian and a few random people to lunch. We decidedly ate in the cafeteria, which is insanely cheap. It was a fun mix of Japanese, Mandarin and English. We also went out for coffee. However, here they milk and sugar their coffee pretty much always. I need to learn the phrase for black coffee because milk and sugar are gross for coffee. I then went a studied for an hour with my intensive class. A few people were late but that’s to be expected on a Friday.

This is coffee. They always give you a bag to carry it around

    Class was a lot of fun! We started with a game that was for us to match up the bo po mo fo characters. It took a really long time for everyone one to finish because it was random. I some how managed to win the game. Chen Laoshi was shocked because I didn’t have to draw cards once. I was named winner and the loser had to give me a quick shoulder massage. Things like that are really common here, having ‘punishments’ for the last person. We were all howling with laughter and frustration. It was an awesome class. We are now officially out of the pronunciation portion and moving into grammar and words. We were given a ton of homework for the weekend, but it’s not really that surprising.

    I ran back to my room to figure out where my roommate was. I talked to Ryan for a short while then got a call from Sean. We were going to meet at the bakery, eat dinner, and get everything sorted. Of course what actually happened was we stood their for ten minutes trying to figure out what we were doing. Sean and I ended up at the vegetarian restaurant. We walked back to the dorms and ate in the lobby with Johnny and James. It was good to be laughing and joking with everyone. It was decided that KTV would be held on Sunday and not tonight. Then the boys decided we all needed to go to the track for a run. I agreed I figured I would only run for a bit, to save my foot.

    So about four miles later, I was feeling really good. It feels awesome to run again. I stopped because the boys had been sitting for a good twenty minutes waiting for me to finish.I was just getting into the zone but I didn’t want to hold them up for another hour. Stopping was ok, I had to take a full cool down lap my legs were so pumped up. I realize now that maybe going for that was perhaps not the best of plans. The foot didn’t hurt per-say, it’s just a little wonky. I’ll be good to it this weekend. We all headed back to the dorms to shower and have a cool down.

     We ended up going out for a little bit and just hanging out. It was James, Johnny, Sean, Nathan Geoff, Daniel and myself. It was a good time, we played a game of cards monopoly, it was ok but most of us were trying to learn how to play so the game went slow. Then after words we head back t the dorm. Little did I realize it was 3 am!! That sorta snuck up on me, but it worked out. It’s technically tomorrow, but it is time to say good night!