Everybody loves Friday!

Yesterday morning I went to work dreading the day to come, but to my surprise, it turned out o.k. I might even say it was a great day. My advisor seemed to be much nicer to me, and when I asked, I was even given rags to wipe my desk with! Still no markers, but hey, one thing at a time. It is China.

The morning flew by and at lunchtime I was given a belated birthday cake. It looked a little sketchy, but turned out to be alright. On top of that, I found out that on Fridays we finish at 2:30. The day just got better and better.

So, after work, I went back to the dormitory and found the people we usually hang out with. We ate cake, some nasty meat candy and yak meat pie and talked about random stuff. And we planned to go to town a little later to have dinner.

In the end, it was only Dan and I that went. We took a nice long walk through the whole village and then found a place to eat. The people were super nice and tried to talk to us even when we (or at least I) really didn't understand. We ordered kung pao chicken and mystery noodles (I only know the word for noodles, not what goes in them). Dan got his enormous dish with a bowl of rice and I got my huge bowl of soup along with a pot of tea. We ate and ate and ate until we were stuffed, and then I fed some of my egg to the cat when I thought the owners weren't looking. As a total sidebar, there are a lot of pet cats and dogs here, which surprised me, but they are all really dirty and sort of mangy looking, well fed though, thanks to people like me.

During our dinner, the owners sat at the other end of the room watching something on television, more or less ignoring us. And a child, or perhaps a very large fish, splashed around in a tub in another room. The man who owned the restaurant came over at one point to ask us why his cell phone had an error message, which was sort of odd, but understandable, since the message was in English and he didn't understand it. Needless to say, we couldn't figure it out. And, I believe that even if we had, we wouldn't have known how to tell him.

We paid our bill and left, heading back to campus. Along the way there were puddles and a few cars to dodge, as usual. We stopped for a moment when we saw a "store" that looked like it might possibly sell books. A moment turned into an hour as they told us to have a seat and then bombarded us with questions. We found out that it was a rental shop for books and vcds and when two friends of the couple came in, we found ourselves answering even more questions. And, yet again, we were presented with a cell phone to fix. This time was slightly easier though because the language had been switched to English and he just wanted it back to Chinese. After about an hour of babble we decided it was time to leave and headed back for some shut eye.

We slept through the night!! That might not seem exciting, but having woken up at 3, 4 or 5 a.m. for the past week, it was really nice to sleep normal hours. We were in bed until 7! And, since breakfast starts at that time, I consider that to be perfect timing.

After breakfast, we left campus with a couple of friends to go for a hike. The trail began on the edge of Changping near the railroad tracks and went steeply up and down hills. At the top of the first little hill, my butt and legs already felt tired, and the dusty air seemed to be taking its toll on my lungs. Surprisingly, however, I seemed to recover a bit and get a second wind, enough to carry me over 5 or so more peaks. There were some very interesting things up there, and some beautiful birds, though looking back at Changping was not exactly breathtaking. Chinese people have not really been all that interested in aesthetics for the past few years so there are more than a few ugly buildings. I should also mention that Chinese people do not have the same respect for their natural surroundings as most western hikers would. There was trash along the entire trail. In parts, it was only a plastic bag or a cigarette pack, but in others the ground was covered. One place in particular, a pagoda on the top of one of the peaks, was especially tragic. There was trash everywhere, the pagoda was filthy and someone had even decided to use it as a bathroom! For a moment the four of us contemplated coming back someday to clean up the trash, but when we thought about hiking back with huge garbage bags, we thought it might be easier said than done. That said, it is a shame that nobody cares for the trail.

We traversed some of the steepest parts of the trail before coming to the end, where a sign warned us that the area we were coming from was forbidden. Chinese people are weird. Needless to say, we were starving when we finished, so we found a small restaurant to eat at and got lucky enough to get good food knowing only the words for vegetables, hot, meat and chicken. Afterwards we did some shopping and headed back. Dan and I crashed for the better part of the evening and only woke up hours later for some late night cleaning and blogging.

This jetlag thing is killing me!