The Coin Era

So, as expected, I have fallen behind on my blog. This will be the first of a few posts that I will write tonight. My last post ended pretty much right after I landed in China, which was two weeks ago, so it is about time I let you know that I am still alive (healthy may be questionable) and that I have had some fun along the way.

The first few days of my trip I call the “Coin Era”. I call it this because the girl that picked me up from the airport had tried to tell me her name in English, but I was so dazed from all of the travel that had happened I thought she told me her English name was Coin. The first few days it seemed like that all we did eat. The funny thing is that the streets are lined with these little garage-like rooms that are shops and restaurants. It is hard to believe that these restaurants stay in business because there are hundreds of them. My favorite dish that we ate that stint of food binging was a hot fish soup thing.

 Most of the food you eat here in China is served family style, cooked in mass amounts of oil, and sometimes impossible to eat with chopsticks.

In between eating and sleeping we did a lot of touring of the school and other basic errands. The school is split into two different campuses, both of which are like giant circles and pretty easy to navigate. Fortunately I finally go to a school where all the buildings look somewhat different.

Here are some pictures of a random green house we went to:

  

            

   

  

     One thing that Coin tried to do is bring some of her friends a long with her the few times that we went out together. My favorite adventure with Coin was when she took us to cook sweet dumplings in the dorm of some of her classmates. The first weekend that I was in China was the Chinese Lantern Festival. The staple treat for the festival is a sweet dumpling called Tang Yuan. Coin wanted us to experience Tang Yuan so she took Andrew (another American from Eckerd) and I to the market to buy them, and we then went to the her friends’ dorm to boil the dumplings. In the dorm room we played computer games, listened to music, and tried not to get lost in translation.
                                                   

This was the last of the “Coin Era” because as the days went on more students in the program started to arrive, and Andrew and I started to do more with them and less with Coin.