COLD NOW

The wind is making scary howling noises outside my window. The good thing is, I wasn't going to go out to find food anyway, because I'm sticking to my budget and therefore dinner plans consisted of making ramen. You'll appreciate my bad eating habits when you get a cool China gift, I promise.

Anyway yesterday our environmental issues class took a day trip to Tianjin. I can't really say much about Tianjin except that they have an awesome planning museum with a truly epic movie about how awesome Tianjin is. We saw where they are planning to build an eco-city on the coast, which should be completed within 20 years or so. It'll be interesting to see how that goes... right now the area is a bunch of polluted grasslands with a nasty polluted river running through it. We had a nice Hunan lunch and then saw a couple factories and then left. Yeah, not the most exciting field trip, but I guess now I can say I visited Beijing's sister city... I guess.

More importantly, Tuesday night we had a lecture where two of Beijing's prominent translators came to speak. Since this just so happens to be my independent research project topic, it was quite fortuitous, really. I will follow up with more info on this later. Tomorrow I've got two tests (and my final day of Chinese class!!) so I might wanna start doing something for those... maybe.