Okay, replying to you guys now ~ maybe I should just start sending you guys Facebook messages or something. D:

nya16 ~ Now that I've gotten used to this place, I'm definitely enjoying it more. :D Classes aren't that exciting though. They're all pretty much a semester's worth packed into one month. It's kind of annoying. . .

Cristy ~ I don't bother trying. It's pretty much impossible, and almost everything in there gets wet. I've gotten used to it by now though. My roommate agrees with comment on the Mirotic poster, by the way. XD

nishasha ~ I kinda like having a super small class. It's a lot more laid back, but we don't really meet very often. Junsu IS on my desk. Or he was. Jaejoong's up there now. And late comments or better than no comments. :D

Mmm, it's been awhile. . . I'm sitting in my room writing this up, so I can't even remember what's happened since I last posted. :/ Darn.

Well, for one thing, I'm pretty sure I failed the Chinese language class. HAHA NO I DIDN'T! I think the oral part of the exam saved me. The teacher says I have really good pronunciation for a beginner. Woohoo!

Uh. . . I've done fun things too. . . I just need to remember them. >.> Well, there was that one that a small group of us randomly decided to go to a pool hall one night. I really suck at it, but almost everyone else did too, so it was okay. We had fun! Valerie and I were also highly amused at music selection ~ It was a weird mix that had mostly the Black Eyed Peas and Big Bang. We sang along with "Haru Haru" as best we could as we were leaving the building. XD

Speaking of singing along. . . To celebrate our Chinese 1 class being over, some of went out to karaoke! :D It was interesting, and I had more fun than I thought I would. I found "Begin", one of the few DBSK songs I know the words to while scrolling through the J-Pop section, Valerie and I managed to sing along with Shinee's "Love Like Oxygen" since there were romanized lyrics with it, and Henry threw in some Chinese songs he knew. Oh, there were English songs in there too. ^_^ Between the six of us who went, there are plenty of videos and pictures. I think Valerie wants to upload the one of me singing "Begin" onto Facebook though, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. >.>

That's all for now. We're leaving for Xi'an early Tuesday morning, and I'm not sure how often I'll be able to get online over there. I am far too attached to the interwebs. D:





Yay karaoke! There's more pictures from that night (and a few other random things) posted here.

I'm Alive!

Because Blogspot isn't nearly as cool as Livejournal and won't let me reply to comments (boo) I'll just reply to them here~

Carly ~ Thanks. I'm getting used to the stares, but I still won't let a creepy old man of any ethnicity take stalkerish pictures of me. >.>

Potetofurai ~ I saw another monk playing with a basketball at the supermarket a few days ago. It was kind of weird. XD

nya16 ~ At least we're not farther up North! It's pretty warm here compared to Beijing, and I'm not looking forward to freezing my butt off when we go there.

Nishka ~ YES, those are Yan Yans! They're so much easier to find here, but I've really got to stop eating them. >.> And Pizza Hut is kind of. . .upscale here. Like, nicely dressed workers with fancy-ish interior decorating and whatnot. Very weird.

So. . . Classes have been interesting. Our Hanyu teacher is really nice and happy all the time, which makes the class interesting. I'm not very good at the language at all though, because of those darn tones. :/ We've had a few different teachers for Contemporary Society who've all been pretty neat. My Eastern Philosophy and Religion class is taught by the director of the program, and there's only one other person taking it, so that's nice. Our Intercultural Communication class is my favorite though ~ we've mainly been watching movies and having lunch at the CSP office. OH! Taiji. I like it, but I'd be enjoying myself a lot more if I wasn't being graded on it. It also doesn't help that we're doing it outside, right in front of the dorm building. >.> A couple days ago we even had a small audience of Japanese girls that watched us for almost an hour. I didn't think we were that interesting. D:

Let's see. . what are the interesting things that have happened? Well, I've seen DBSK, Rain, and Super Junior M popping up in random places every now and then. There's a DBSK "Mirotic" poster hanging in the window of a CD/DVD store; Valerie bought some snack cakes that had Rain on the box because she thought it was hilarious, Han Geng was in a Chinese drama and a commercial with the Suju M guys played before it; when we were walking to the Three-Self Church in Gulangyu, I heard DBSK's "Crazy Love" playing out of a guy's cell phone; on Saturday, when Valerie and I went out to the shopping street, we heard Suju-M, DBSK, and Backstreet Boys songs playing out of different stores all in the span of 5 minutes. XD Oh, and I found a legit copy of DBSK's "Rising Sun" tour at that CD/DVD store for way cheap. Now I just need to cross my fingers and hope I can find the "O" and "Five in the Black" tours somewhere as well. :D

Ah, and speaking of that record store ~ Valerie and I went on Sunday, when it was less busy. Before we walked in, we could hear Chinese music playing inside the store, but the moment we stepped inside, they switched it to American hip-hop that neither one of us liked. ._. The very second my feet stepped out of the store, I saw the cashier flip a switch out of the corner of my eye and the music immediately changed back to Chinese. Ironically, we only bought Asian music. XD That's when I got the Rising Sun concert tour, and Rain's "It's Raining" CD (it's the only one of his I like enough to buy). I've been back since then and got a couple of Chinese CDs as well. One was Mayday's "Poetry of the Day After" and Fahrenheit's "Love You More and More". I'm kind of surprised I bought that one, actually. I've listened to a Fahrenheit CD before and didn't like it very much, but saw a recent music video of theirs on TV and liked it enough to download their latest CD. Now I own it and I'm listening to it all the time. ._. I also got "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist", "Changeling", and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" on DVD. Obviously, those are not legit. >.>

Hrm. The only other thing worth mentioning was meeting Heather's (she's like the second in command/RA around here) Chinese friend Henry. When we were introduced, a small group of us were sitting on the ground outside the building with free wifi, so when I stood up a few minutes later, he was surprised at how tall I was. ^^; Then he asked if I played sports, I said I used to, and he asked "football?" I think you might know what my first thought was ~ big guys running around in helmets, tight pants, and huge shoulder pads trying to tackle each other to the ground. It didn't take him long to remember what Americans call football, and the poor guy was slightly mortified. XD Ah, and a few of us have also gone to dinner a couple times with Amanda, a Chinese student here, and that's been fun. All the Chinese people I've met here so far have been super nice.

Uh. . . Pictures?



The room!



My desk!



The bathroom. . .is weird. The shower, toilet, sink, and mirror are all in the same little room. I'm not a big fan of the setup. :/



I love Engrish. XD That menu is actually from a really good restaurant. The woman who works there is nice and knows a little bit of English.



Zhongshan Lu! It's the main shopping street in town.



I'll always think this picture is ridiculous, but when I saw it in the window, it made me smile. ^_^ Then Valerie laughed at me. ._.

I need to remember to carry my camera around more often so I can get more interesting pictures. D:

Oh, and my lantern festival pictures are here if you haven't seen them yet!

Finally in Xiamen

Let's see, where did I leave off from LiveJournal? . . .I think I had a couple days of Hong Kong left? Well, there's really nothing interesting about 'em, except that Liz, Ryan, and I decided to eat dinner at Pizza Hut one night. It was a lot different than the ones back home. o_o

Leaving Hong Kong was interesting. We took an overnight bus to Xiamen, and guess what! Instead of seats, there were beds! Kinda like the Knight Bus in Harry Potter! Thankfully, these beds were stationary:



We ended up arriving in Xiamen around 5:30 in the morning. Blech. A bus from the university picked us up. . .somewhere, and when we finally got to the campus, we had a few hours to get situated before going to dinner at the CSP offices. We met Dr. Jay's Chinese wife, Yili, and their daughter. Dr. Jay and Yili are interesting to watch. There's definitely and East meets West thing goin' on there. XD

Uh. . . What else?

Oh! Chinese New Year! We went to a banquet on New Year's Eve, which was held for the foreigners on campus. There are a lot. That day was also my birthday (I think I heard Yili say that was good luck for me), so when we got together for a meeting in Heather's room, the rest of the group gave me a birthday gift of foods and drinks that they noticed I like. 8D



I also got a birthday gift for myself earlier that day! We stopped by a store in the afternoon that had good prices on clothes because a few people needed jackets ~ I ended up finding a cute one that actually FIT ME. I got really excited. >.>

img src="http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/5433/90267473ni1.jpg">

There's Engrish on it too!



On New Year's Day, some of us went to check out the temple. I ended up wandering off by myself up the mountain. I got a lot of stares. One guy even followed me a bit with his camera trying to get a picture. . . I purposely kept my back to him because it was kind of creepy. ._.

Anyway. . . Pictures! The second one is the Xiamen University campus from the highest point I got on the mountain ~ I almost got to the end, but the path started getting really narrow and crowded, so I figured it was best to head back down.





Later that night, we went to see fireworks!





And here's a few random things before I go:

~ No central heating in the dorm building (or any building, really) sucks.
~ I saw a record store with a DBSK Mirotic poster in the window and it made me really happy.
~ I saw monks shopping at the supermarket!

That's all for now. There's more pics, here.

First Post!

Hey there, to anyone who might be reading!

I'll be using this blog during my 3 month stay in China, since my main blog is blocked over there. ;_; This post is just to say "hi" for now though ~ thankfully my other blog is accessible in Hong Kong, so I won't be using this one till the end of January. So see you then!