A Day in the Life

Okay, so it's not even a day, but it is random moments from in one day.

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Today, when I am in a small store buying eggs and what I thought was oil (and now that I've opened it, I really have no idea WHAT it is... but I tried oiling my wok with it anyway), and the lady working there was speaking Chinese to me.  Which is not too surprising, given as how I'm in China and all.  Unfortunately, being in China does not give me magical abilities to understand Chinese, and so mostly I understood about as much as your next stereotyped monolingual American.  I was kind of doing the smile/nod/ignore-and-continue-picking-out-my-eggs -- which she had helpfully informed me were chicken eggs, yes, we have those in the US too :) -- and all of a sudden I understood something that she was asking me. 

Are you French?

Um no.

So I told her that I was American, which elicited a very long response and I got my eggs and went up to the cash register.

I decided that maybe this grocery store is out of the range of normal foreigner wanderings when I continued hearing meiguo meiguoren! as I checked out and up to the point that I left the store.  Yep, I'm from America, yep, I'm American. 

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As I walked back to the school, I heard someone yell "HELLO!" and I turned to see.  It was a young guy in a very bright jacket on his motorcycle, who had turned his head to see if I was going to respond.  If you crash because you're so busy yelling greetings at the foreign girl... I don't even know.

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Tonight I bought an ice cream bar that had chocolate covering it with sunflower seeds in the chocolate.  I also had milk tea today that turned out to be red bean milk tea.  It's a bit of a surprise to expect some sort of jelly-like substance to come through your straw and instead end up with a mouthful of beans.

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We went on one of the bumpiest bus rides that I've ever been on.  It probably gives the wooden rollercoaster at Lakemont a run for the money.  :)

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The new header is pictures of my campus.  It's so lovely.  There also were people on campus this evening with swords.  The freshmen are all still in the middle of their military training, so they have to go everywhere in camo.  And there is a rollerblading club.

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My friend Kelsey, who is on the other teaching team, has family near where there's been a lot of damage from Isaac.  So if you would keep her and her family in your thoughts, that would be awesome.

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Classes start for me (...meaning that I start teaching, it's strange to be on the other side of things all of a sudden) on Monday.  I get less nervous about it when I actually am with students, which I guess is good.  :)