One month down!

Margaritas with Hannah at Zapata's

You can dance on the bar, just put your drink/cigarette down first!

Natasha, Mal, and I at M1NT for Charley's birthday

 

 

Matching lace =)

It's crazy to think that I've been here for over a month already!!! It feels like I just left home but that I've been here forever, all at the same time.

Last week was good but really long. I had my first Wushu, or Chinese martial arts, lesson on Monday! It was so much fun! There are only four of us in the class so we have a lot of one on one time with our instructor, Prof. Yang. He's amazing-I just want to sit and watch him demonstrate all of his skills. Last week we just learned the basic stances and strikes, I think this week we are adding in footwork!

These pictures are from my week/weekend- the first two are from Ladies' Night at this Mexican bar called Zapata's. Margarita's were free from 10-12 for ladies, so we went there to meet up with a friend's family who was in town. Saturday was my friend Charley's birthday, so we took her out to dinner and then to this really swanky club called M1NT-they had a shark tank at the entrance! We all wore black and she wore orange so she would stand out more as the birthday girl; she loved it! =)

I just finished my second Chinese test-it went pretty well I think. We're starting to write whole paragraphs in Chinese, which is frightening but really cool! Taking our test today means I don't have much Chinese to do this week, and my Issues class is talking about gender and the crisis of masculinity tomorrow...should be a great week of classes!

My new favorite obsession is buying cheap movies from the back gate-they're only 10Kuai, which is ~$1.60!!! I found the 6-hour BBC version of Pride and Prejudice and almost died of happiness. I'm going to come home broke, but with so many DVDs!! =)

Citygod Temple!

My absolute favorite picture: Old Shanghai (the Temple) meets new (Bund skyline in the background).

Elephant statue we found

View from the street market outside the temple

McDonald's, of course!

A woman worshiping one of the main deities

Men chanting and praying

Local deities

Offerings are made daily

 

 

Finally had a strong enough connection to upload some more pictures! These are from last Friday's day trip to Citygod Temple.

Last week was pretty normal (it still feels weird saying that because I'm still IN CHINA). I had my very first Chinese test, and it went surprisingly well! It was just a normal test, but it was still longer than my final was for Chinese last semester. Woof. This Friday's day trip was to an old market-it would've been really nice but I was freezing the whole time! Then they took us to Piro's, which is a bar my friends and I really love going to that's owned by a CIEE & Penn State grad. We split into teams of 6 and had a hamburger eating competition, where we had 3 minutes to eat as many mini hamburgers as possible. My team won! I only ate 3 and the two other girls on the team only had 3 between them, but the guys were beasts! We ate 32 hamburgers in 3 minutes!!! We won 500 kuai ($1 American is about 6 kuai) to split between the six of us at Piro's.

This week should be pretty uneventful-cultural classes start this week so I'll be doing martial arts on Monday and learning how to make dumplings (Jiaozi-饺子) on Friday! My Chinese class is going out for lunch on Thursday, too. Maybe I'll actually start working out regularly this week? Maybe not...

P.S. It was great to hear of Roncalli's boys basketball team beating Cathedral! I remember how awesome it was when we beat them my senior year (am I old enough to talk about "glory days"?)-thankfully this class of seniors wasn't stupid enough to try to do the Lebron James powder trick like we did! Good job Bradley Fey!!! As a former babysitter, I'm taking full credit. =)