Right now I am so full from sushi and a tea egg but guess how much I spent? Less than $2 USD. Say whaaaaat? Yeah, that’s right. I still can’t get over the pricing of food here. Of course since I’m not too picky with what I eat, I tend to like to go cheaper but you can still go to $3-5 USD easily here if you wanted something better. I don’t know if I raved about the 7 Eleven here already…wait, I just remembered I did so I shall not go too deep into it BUT 7 Eleven is like Wal-mart to a college student. They sell almost everything you want. I even bought underwear and laundry detergent there when was in dire need of clothes. Saved my life. But I would have to say my all time favorite purchases from there would have to be the 饅頭, 英絲捲, and 茶葉蛋 (because I still love my eggs). I <3 7 Eleven.

Classes started on Monday. I have to be honest and say that they’re a lot harder and more challenging than I expected. Since learning is my primary goal here, I figured I’m not going to take the easy way out this time. Now I feel like my motto work hard, play hard is actually in play. During the weekdays, I work until I feel like I’m going crazy and my butt hurts from sitting on this metal folding chair (which is indeed my desk chair, uncomfortable little thing it is) then take a break, eat or go out walking/running, then come back and work until bedtime. It’s…really is tiring and a little 辛苦 but I’m very thankful I actually find joy in learning it. When it’s time to play, my whole heart is into it and I don’t feel guilty that I don’t deserve to have free time because I know I worked really hard. The bad thing is, I can’t play the whole weekend. ToT I try not to go to bed too late since I have to wake up every day at 6:45 but I feel like sleep deprevation may soon come upon me. *sigh* Perhaps sometime soon you’ll see me complaining about lack of sleep.

My textbook here costs $15.87. Now that’s reasonable. Who sells books for $200+ anyways? It’s all in Chinese except for the vocab words which have pinyin in the vocab index at the end of the book. The typical lesson has around 60 vocab phrases which we get tested on twice per week. ToT I got at most 40 something for each lesson back at PSU.

I have around 10 classmates from Korea, Japan, Sweden, Russia, and Belarus. They are all really cool and sweet people. My teacher is demanding but also funny so our laughs in class help us get through the 3 hours of class everyday. There’s this one dude from Korea who looks almost exactly like Jeff Tom (former prez of AACF). I wanted to take a picture today but figured it’s still too soon to be creepy.

My classmates are funny as well. There was an incident yesterday in which someone wrote something that started with “F” on a really dusty desk. One of the guys walked by and exclaimed, “Heeeeeeey! Who wrote fock-uh?” He was trying to say f*** but because of his accent, it came out as 2 syllables and with a different pronunciation. The second guy came up and was like, “I DIDN’T WRITE FOCK-UH!” with the same accent although strangely they were both from different countries. And they started arguing about whether the word was f*** or not. I cracked up…but you had to be there in order to share my joy.