Monday, Monday

OK, so there's not many pictures today, but there are a few to come.

Firstly, I like my teachers.  I have Zhu Laoshi in the morning from 9:30am--12:50pm.  That's a long time, but she gives us breaks so it's fine.  I'm really proud that it wasn't until about an hour in that I realized she had said only about 3 English words.  I actually get what she says for the most part.  Of course she speaks slowly for us, but she's really nice and spunky.  The one thing that kind of throws me off is that she's from Taiwan so she uses some of the phrases that are more common there like "nei ge" instead of "na ge" and "zhei" instead of "zhe."  It's minor though, and I like how she teaches.

After morning class, I went to get my CU Link Card, which is like the Carolina Card at USC.  I had to walk to Pi Ch'iu Hall to get it, which would have been quite a hike by itself.  However, about halfway there, I found what has to be the steepest hill without stairs on the entire campus.  I tripped and tumbled a few yards down the scratchy bumpy pavement and miraculously, only my left knee got badly scraped.  So the rest of me just had a few nicks and scratches, but my knee got it pretty bad.  I had to use up the last of my travel Kleenex to get the blood to stop enough for me to walk to the shuttle stop.  Needless to say my plans had changed to a visit to the Health Centre.  Guess what, though?  The shuttle never stops anywhere close to it.  The closest stop is Pentecostal Mission Hall, which is about a 10 minute walk from the Health Centre.  So I ended up having to walk.  The up side to my staggering around campus with blood gushing down my leg was that a lot of the native Chinese came up to talk to me, even if they didn't speak English.  I got a lot of "Zao gao!  Ni xing ma?  Ni zhi dao yi yuan zai na li?"  I ended up practicing how to ask for directions because my campus map wasn't very helpful.  I got to the Health Centre and the nurses there wiped off the blood and picked out all the gravel before disinfecting and bandaging it.  I didn't take a before picture because (1) I was a little busy trying not to bleed all over the place and (2) I didn't want to gross anybody out because it looks really GROSS.  But this is how it looked when the nurse was done:

The nurse didn't understand English or Mandarin too well so all I could really say to her was "yumgohee"--the only word I know in Cantonese, which is "thank you."  She gave me two bottles of disinfectant, two packs of alcohol wipes, and some medical tape.  The lady at the counter told me I didn't have to pay for any of it, which was really cool.  Apparently, I have succumbed to Obama-care.

Needless to say I didn't make it to Pi Ch'iu Hall before my next class.  I really just had time to stop by the Benjamin Franklin Centre for lunch.  Oh, and I snagged a picture of the creepy unicorns.

So the second class was cool too.  That's the individualized stuff so we meet in the big group on Mondays and split into 4-person groups on every other day of the week.  Each group has 2 teachers.  The big group teacher we had today was Liu Laoshi, and she was just great.  I think I like her even better than Zhu Laoshi.

Oh, and just for fun...Lady Gaga.  Why is Asia so obsessed with Lady Gaga?  These posters are at every single shuttle stop on campus.

And, last but not least, a mediocre end to a mediocre day:  dinner.  Appetizing, I know.  This is what I get for going somewhere new.  They called it ham and egg with rice.  I call it better than it looks, but that's still not saying much.  As Hiroki and Kae taught me to say yesterday, itadakimasu...