Musings in China and Japan: Day 2

I'm about one day behind on all of my blog updates, so I'll be talking about yesterday here. Yesterday was as busy as the day before, but I have less to tell you because most of it was orientation. However, we had a 4 hour lunch break, so a group and I went to a nearby university to walk around. With that and the tour of Peking, I have tons of pictures. I'll put them at the end.

After orientation we had a "welcome dinner" at a nice restaurant on campus. It was really interesting. Basically it was set up like your typical chinese restaurant in CA, but we didn't order anything (maybe the program pre-ordered or something.) It was also a little different because we only had a small "desert" plate instead of a dinner plate, so you don't pick up a lot of food at once, you just grab whatever you want from the lazy suzan. So we sat down and a few dishes were brought out and put in the center. Alright, so this is appetizers or something, and we'll wait for 15 minutes or so and the rest of the food will come out, right? Nope. The food was brought throughout the dinner, just a constant flow of new dishes. And each time a new dish was brought out they had to be stacked around the old ones, until at the end we had about 3 layers of dishes piled on top of and around each other. There was a lot of food. And it was all pretty delicious too. We had the iconic peking duck, along with a bunch of other dishes I'd never had before. It was pretty interesting.

When we finally left the building to head back to the dorms, we discovered that we were in the middle of a thunderstorm, and hardly any of us had our umbrellas. Guess that was a lesson to us. But it wasn't raining terribly hard, and David was kind enough to let me put my purse in his backpack, so it wasn't too bad. My shoes are still a bit damp, but the rest of me actually dried really quickly. Finally, thanks to the rain last night, the weather today is really nice. It's like, neutral. It's not cold or even cool, and it's definitely not hot. The smog has gone down quite a bit too.

That's pretty much it for yesterday. We have a lecture on US-Chinese relations in an hour or so, and a bunch of us are planning to go shopping tonight, so I'll let you know how that goes. Here are the pictures I promised!

This is basically a Chinese hard doughnut.

Went to a nearby little store for breakfast with my rooommate and some of the UCEAP people we met in the elevator on the way down. This park was in the same area. Apparently all these playground toys are for adults too. And putting on traditional Chinese music and dancing around in the park is apparently really popular.

The beginning of the orientation was in a really fancy building. We felt under-dressed.

Anjing!

We got a tour around the university after a lecture on safety.

KITTY!!!!! Like I said, there are small animals all over the place here. There's this one adorable puppy in the dorm complex....

Dragonfruit! Apparently the literal translation of the Chinese name is fire dragon fruit or something.

squished peaches

The cherries look so good. I'm definitely getting some sometime soon.

Haruhi Suzumiya telling you to pay 1500 yuan for 2 years.

Most of the university is a bunch of rundown looking buildings, but there's a huge park and lake in it too, apparently it's where the office buildings are.

You have to enlarge the picture to actually see it, but this tree was COVERED in caterpillars. If you can see all those small, dangling things on the tree, those aren't seed pods. Apparently this is the hopping place to turn into a butterfly.