Blog 22-23-24

Good Day Everyone… I do have a lot to tell –  Things are getting busier, so I may have to unfortunately have to cut down to three days a week from now on. Let’s start with this last Thursday? 

Cali and I were invited over to J.P.’s house?  If you don’t know J.P., the best way I can describe is he is Mormon, very upright person, married, my age, and has a little baby boy named “Kai.”  EVERYBODY loves J.P.  He was my neighbor in Qingdao.  His wife Andrea invited us over for Mexican food!  It was soo good!

Friday was kind of ordinary, I stayed up until 2:00 watching a documentary and doing a report about Spring Festival migrant workers.  It is the largest migration in the world.  If you are at all curious about it, I would actually very much recommend it.  They follow a family, and a girl in particular. “归途列车” here is the link to the video.  LOL This totally threw off my sleeping schedule, and I ended up falling asleep early at 9, and waking up at 3!  Good heavens.  At least I got to go to the hair stylist美发师later, that was fun… however it took four hours!!!  Okay, you are probably rolling your eyes at me again.  I don’t know why, but the black hair just wasn’t really working out for me.  It didn’t even serve its purpose – I didn’t blend in at all.  LOL but – after this haircut, you’ll have to let me know what you think, they stripped  the black out and put in brown (like my childhood color) and then cut some natural bangs.  People - I think I have to say, I think I found the secret to blending in:  BANGS! 刘海 When I went to the flower blossom festival *(the same place I went to before where 12+ people asked for a picture)… I only got one request!  It isn’t because I’m scary either (I hope)  I have compliments, but I am hiding behind these magic bangs … and it’s great!  I’m just one of the crowd, I feel that I have shed a part of my animal skin =)  My advice is, if you want to use your hair as a part of your disguise in Asia, have an Asian person do it!

The next day, my friends: 李岳 (roommate Liyue) and her good friend 邵莹洁 went with me to the plum blossom festival  (meihuajie)  梅花节(this was yesterday – Saturday)  It was beautiful.  So very soon, I hope that I will be able to post pictures, and manage the website myself! Stay tuned and you will also get to see the beautiful plum blossoms  =)

I was so tired after that day, especially because I was up so early, but Cali and I went to the Café to pull a marathon study session – 6 hours. Lol  We are both determined to memorize between 3-5 thousand characters.  J.P. lent me his “3000 most-frequently Chinese Character Dictionary”.  It is funny, but after four years of studying Chinese, it always comes back to this memory game, what can I recognize, what tone is this character, what radical is this?  This is my mountain to climb, wish me luck… My task is 50 characters per day, in addition each character has 5 related words that include the character ( for those of you unfamiliar, most Chinese words contain two characters).  Wish me luck!  I am behind from Friday (-50)

Also, today I went to the 书城 to purchase several books for my class.  I will have to go online though, nobody had them!  I want to tell you Chinese book stores are amazing – usually 5 stories tall!  I could spend a whole day there-So much fun!  Later I met with my friend from Ghana, had some coffee (he is a computer engineer and will help me use facebook )  !!!  Progress!!!  Currently I am in a bar called “talking”  eating pasta =)  Girl’s gotta live a little  =)  The waiter is kind of funny, he tripped over chair after asking me how I was, poor thing!  Now I am listening to Tequila Sunrise.  It is my condolence as I realize I locked the door and left the keys inside of my apartment.  It is going to start raining soon, and this is bad because it was sunny earlier and because of this I decided to clean my bed sheets and hang them dry.  Now they are stuck there, and I will have to wash them again to get the pollution rain water out of them  X_X . Even though it is Sunday, my roommate is in class. LOL  -but the Eagles are making it slightly better now… Take another shot of courage… the days go passing by… sigh… that they do!