LIVING in China, more experiences

My school schedule has decidedly become more natural. Now that 国庆节 is over, I can resume going to school for 5 days a week, with no break until I go back home! YIPPEE...not. In a smart move, I decided to drop my 报刊 class and pick up reading Chinese newspapers on my own time. However, as I feel like the school knew I was making this decision, they decided to make my psychotic 精读 teacher assign me a similar assignment of reading and critiquing a newspaper, only this time I do it TWICE a week. What a psycho. Not only that, because of her I learned a whole new, very useful, word outside of class: 拖堂 which is a verb that means, "to not dismiss class when the time is up." What a very useful word to describe my teacher, who keeps me in 30 to 60 minutes after dismissal time, some students even complained, and you know it's serious when a student would go so far as to "disrespect" the teacher, strangely enough it looked like she took offense to it. Either way, school is a pain in the ass but I feel like it is a lot more immersion, considering the students that I am in the class with are all pretty much Korean and their only means of communication would be through Chinese, how exciting.

In other news, 上个星期我看过了众多蟑螂在我的房间．它们就是在我的床上，地毯上，还有在我的天花板。Gross right? In English, it means: last week I saw hella cockroaches in my room. They were found on my BED, on the floor (carpet?), and on my ceiling. It's disgusting, and everytime I go downstairs to complain, they just tell me it's 免不了的, which means it's unavoidable and it happens in a lot of peoples' rooms. I don't CARE if it happens in a lot of peoples' rooms it's in mine. Anyway, I feel like I complained about it before but the frequency of sightings had gone up since then that I had to take harsh measures. I complained and yelled as much as I could in Chinese to the management and they decided that maybe they would try to spray the killing cockroach spray more around my room, I mean there are none in Tammy's room, why I am having an infestation problem? To ameliorate the situation myself...I went to the China Walmart (沃尔马）and bought a couple of those cockroaches check in and DIE traps that I used to have for ants when I was a little kid. I set them all over my room in attempts to draw them out and kill them, but the next day when I DID see them, they walked right past. However, it's been 2 days without a sighting, hopefully the management did something more that prevented them from coming. I can sleep in my bed in peace again.

Oh, one last thing. There's been this place that us UC students call the "胡同" or the "hutong" which is literally translated as a narrow street. But this street is the place to BE, people are always around and it's pretty much a small snack street that you can go and see local people and eat very cheap and good food. I usually have my meals here, pictures will soon come (haven't had the mind to take a picture of it yet). Anyway, the other day, after ordering the same meal from the same place that I've been ordering for 1 month, I have really BAD stomach problems. And when I say bad in China, I mean bad -- waking up and having to go 3 times during the night. Don't even get me going on details. In the end, it made me scared of going there again, though I will eventually go back because I can't resist the cheap, tasty goodness. It just disappointed me that something so awesome could be so TAINTED. I think it might have to do with the fact that when I eat in China, I EAT. I don't skimp on meals and sometimes (most of the times) eat more than I think my stomach can handle. From what my teacher said one day, the food can be bad but your stomach can take it in small portions, but if you eat too much, you will have a bad stomach ache (in this he was referring to the school cafeteria (much cleaner, at least it looks like it, than the hutong).

What should you expect from China? Exactly this. But other than that :) ... It's awesome. But as I thought about maybe staying for one more semester, I saw that my Tele-bears appointment has just arrived and that I will be able to sign up for Spring semester classes. Sweet.