I’m first going to describe a phenomenon that’s been discovered while on the trip. It’s actually more been created than discovered, but the phenomenon is known as the “Vandy Pause” and it exists when we’re in a large-ish group (>4 people) and we come to a crossroads. Very rarely does this decision carry any great weight-usually something like, “do we want to go left or right?” but we end up standing in the same spot (usually in the middle of traffic) and awkwardly look at each other for a few minutes until someone makes a decision. It happens anywhere and everywhere there are Vandy people gathered, and it’s getting to be frustrating. It’s something that we’ll just roll with though; it may have to involve me making more impulse decisions.
Today, we went to the Old Summer Palace, which was recently redone (the New Old Summer Palace?) which is conveniently in the backyard of our campus at PKU. I won’t bore you with the details here-lots of pretty paths and buildings and lakes. There was a zodiac museum-all those of the Dragon (1988, fo sho) had a good bonding moment around our statue. It gave us power.
I’ve still managed to avoid American food for the most part, and I’m absolutely loving the food here. I have no idea what I’m eating for the most part, or how healthy (or not) it is, but who asks questions when you’re in another country? We’ve determined that 90% of the meat we’re eating isn’t what we’re being told, and I’m totally OK with that.
Because the dorm we’re staying in is the international students dorm, we’re running in to way more Americans than I had expected, which is awesome. There’s a crew here from UMadison studying feng shui (donchya knooooow), a group from Illinois Wesleyean studying history, and some kids from Stanford finishing up their Spring term here. Plan to party soon.
We talked this afternoon with a few Chinese PKU students that speak English. The conversation quickly degenerated into girltalk about relationships and dating, but it was interesting for the most part. They’ve been studying English for 10 years and it was still somewhat broken-I feel like learning a foreign language is such a commitment, I can’t even imagine being fluent in anything other than English. Maybe if I live in China, that’ll change…
