Live from Tsinghua University

That's right, I'm posting from Cheng's dorm at Qinghua while he makes himself pretty before we go out to eat. Yesterday we discovered that this restaurant/cafeteria place right next to his dorm serves individual style hotpots and they are delicious! For 5 kuai you get the boiling soup thing, and 5 more kuai gets you a plate of raw meat to cook. Vegetables, noodles, and beer are all 3 kuai each, so basically, it's an afforable affair and all around good time.

The past two days I've had off from classes, which has been wonderful. I could have gone somewhere far away but I was too lazy to plan a trip and get train tickets and all that. Besides, Beijing has so much to offer that it's nice to kick it around here, especially when I don't have to worry about having a tingxie in Chinese class the next day.

So we've been chilling like villians, except the real villian today is the air pollution. It's one of those days where "fresh air" outside simply does not exist. Hopefully it'll clear up soon because it sure puts a damper on sight-seeing when you can't actually see anything.

In other news, Wednesday our program got to meet a bunch of Chinese BFSU students from the English department, and we had a grand old networking and chatting session. The girls I talked to were all really nice and seem very chill. They all seemed to enjoy watching movies and most of us had the same taste in films, which is to say, we all like Johnny Depp. Haha. But seriously, we exchanged info and I'm hoping to get together with some of them in the future and a) eat some food b) watch some movies c) go shopping d) see some sights e) all of the above plus chatting.

Unfortunately I forgot my camera once again but maybe I will talk Cheng into using his fancy camera phone to take some shots of our dinner tonight, since we're going to hotpot it up again. P.S. I might need to change my Chinese name. More to come on that later...