Tsampa == Dirt == Yummy

We ate at a Tibetan restaurant last night and the food, to me, was excellent. Nobody else ate besides professor Epstein. We had Tsampa dumplings that basically tasted like dirt. It was great, I ate 4 of them. I also had a few different types of curry chicken, some vegetarian stuff, and Tibetan butter tea.

I wasn’t too crazy about the tea–it was just tea cut in half with Yak butter. They also gave use Yak yogurt, but I wasn’t brave enough to try that. It looked like they just let Yak milk rot for about 4 months then served the chunky stuff at the bottom.

After that we came back for the “English Corner” Russel had organized. It was huge. The Chinese students far outnumbered everyone else.

Within about 3 minutes of sitting down a gang of four girls had already rushed me to talk about stuff. They asked all kinds of questions about the USA, what I like, etc. One thing that really bothered me was a lot of the questions seemed prompted–like things their professors told them to ask.

One thing I have to say though, their English was as a whole, very good. They definitely had a strong accent and sometimes had to repeat something for me to understand it, but they had an excellent vocabulary and were all very smart.

By the end of the night there was Justin, a guy we met at lunch one day, a gang of 7 or 8 girls, and this one jittery guy from Anhui who talked really fast and kept insisting Detroit is in New York no matter how many different ways I explained it was not. I ended up being the last person there because nobody in my group apparently got sick of talking to me. We were there from 7:30 till they locked the building and threw us out at 10:10. I got a lot of names and numbers, so maybe I can get back in touch with people.

This was kind of a shock experience, because the entire time I’ve been here nobody has tried to talk to me at all. Hell, even in Michigan nobody ever talks to me–not even my friends. Then out of the blue I get bum rushed by this crowd of girls. It was just … weird. I don’t know, I’m still out-of-sorts from the whole thing.

I’m kind of reluctant to call some people back, because I’m worried some of them were only talking to me because their professors asked them to. A lot of questions seemed very formulaic–especially the “Do you like Friends?” “Do you have a cell phone?” “What do you think of Bush?” “Do you think the USA would go to war with China if China took Taiwan?”

The strangest question of the evening was when someone asked if I was single. That just kind of came out of the blue. It was like, “What books do you read? Uh huh. Uh huh. Are you single?”

So anyway, I think we’re doing this again next Friday. I hope to get to ask them more questions next time instead of just being drilled. They drilled me for an hour and a half, then asked if there was anything I wanted to ask and I was just like “Uhhhhhhhhhh …” My brain was pretty fried at that point.

We went to the Temple of Heaven today. That was kind of neat, though it was a very long walk. I got a lot of pictures of the flowers there. I’ve been really into close-in nature photography lately for some reason, maybe it’s just because so many plants here are subtly different than what we have at home. It’s become an obsession of mine to photograph flowers, grass and twisted bark. Maybe I can get an internship with National Geographic or Ranger Rick (is that one even around anymore?).

I’m looking forward to having tomorrow off to study, study, then maybe hit TianYi and finally get the 茶杯 I wanted to buy and couldn’t find since TianYi is a maze. There’s an entire floor of purses… purses. And better yet, the English sign calls them “Skin Boxes.”

Advice/suggestion/etc on stuff to do/eat/whatever or advice on not coming off like a jerk to people (I have mega talent in that area) would be welcome. There’s not much else that’s eventful for this entry.

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