Home Sweet Home

Okay, so I have a lot of catching up to do, so you're going to have to be patient while I put up several posts in one day.

I'd like to tell you about my dorm and Beida, the university I'm attending. Everything is looking pretty bleak right now because it is still wintertime here. Some of the buildings on campus are really beautiful, and look like traditional Chinese architecture with curved roofs and colorful trimming. Other buildings look like the Soviet-esque gray box. Boring, ugly, and depressing.

My dorm is another story altogether. It really looks like a haunted hotel from the outside, just like something from a horror movie. I don't mind living there at all, even though we still have no internet. My roommates are very nice and we all get along great, and all the students in my program are living in the same building. The dorm used to be a hotel, and kind of still is. We have maids come in every day to make our beds, bring us hot water for tea, and clean the bathroom. However, sometimes the water is brown and cold, the paint is peeling off the walls, and there is mold and mildew making itself as much as home as I am. Also, our toilet doesn't flush very well, so we can't put any toilet paper in it. Trust me, it's not as bad as it sounds, and I'm making the most of the things my room does have: a tv, a bed, a desk, and a shower. That's really all I need : ).

The campus is almost like a grid, with very straight streets intersecting each other; it is very much like Beijing in its square design. I have a little red ID card that lets me in and out of the campus walls and into my dorm. A lot of times we eat on campus at various snack shops and convenience stores that sell bottled water, dumplings, crackers, stir fry, and baozi - which is a breakfast food stuffed bun. However, for dinner we go off campus to one of the thousands of restaurants withing walking distance. The other day, my friends and I were eating at a restaurant outside of the West Gate of campus (we can't read the characters for the actual name of the restaurant). We were eating broccoli, rice, and kung pow chicken, when all of a sudden an enormous fish leapt out of its aquarium and slapped the waitress across the face before falling on the floor. The fish was flopping around until finally, the waitress and the cook picked up the fish with a net and plopped it back into the tank with the other fish. Hygenic? I think not.

The first picture is of the International Relations Department in Beijing University. The second picture is of my dorm...creepy huh? The third picture is of me and two other international students in front of the History Department, where we will take all our classes.