成都

余怡和我在成都天府广场
masa and christine with 钵钵鸡
大熊猫繁殖研究中心... shawna in animal form :)
me, Pingping, christine, and brittany

Aboard the flight from Chengdu (成都） to Lijiang (丽江) I listened to Christmas music and felt warm and chuckled to myself thinking about how quickly the remaining month and a half will slide by and soon I will be once again home for the holidays. And two weeks after that at long last I will be reunited with my love. I still have at least 6 flights before I get to that point unfortunately, but it is keeping me running.
This time in China I've really experienced the feeling of "cultural isolation," as it's sometimes referred. I should say it has been valuable for me to go through this though in the long run. What's aggravated it is how bad the food in Nanjing is. As well I practically have no friends in my program. I mean have a few I'm becoming better friends with, but I don't feel much connection with the lot of them. I get along fine though and can carry on a semi-respectable conversation. I would like to say however, that as a group these kids can get pretty strange. Amidst this 9-day sojourn quite a bit of drama has been stirred that was fermenting for weeks, enough to fill a mini-soap opera to keep me entertained. I am in the perfect position: on the outside looking in, without even the least bit of involvement. Group travel is quite a pain, and so our stay in Chengdu was mostly such. But I did have a few golden times that made it worth it... such as at a small restaurant the other night with a group of friends; we ordered several dishes including something specifically Sichuanese called Boboji (钵钵鸡）. When we finished eating there was a very awesome moment of relief when we found out that the boboji we ate was left over from the customers before us who had ordered it, and that which we did not eat was destined for the next customers to order it. Afterwards, going along with one person's desire to go meet up with others in a clubbing district, instead of going to dance, I along with myriad other bystanders watched a man beat himself up, crawling across the ground moaning and crying and wallowing in his own blood. Shortly thereafter I went back to the hotel.
Chengdu otherwise is a pretty chill city; they say the people here lead quite laid back and enjoyed lives and I believe it based on my initial impressions. There isn't much exciting going on there though, but the food is amazing. I ate hotpot with so much huajiao (花椒) my ears literally went numb. Today before leaving the city for Lijiang I met with my dad's friend 余怡 early in the morning. She took me to a nice Buddhist temple, followed by two meals at different restaurants back-to-back, coffee and the public square 天府广场 at the city center. It was a great time though because I spent the entire day speaking Chinese, and not just the basic practical stuff, but actual discussions about a wide range of topics such as graduate school, relative housing expenses, places in China, random experiences and opinions, eastern medicine, food, 等等. With such comprehensive discussion I was able to practice my listening and speaking skills over a very broad range of vocabulary.