A Quick Dorm Tour and the Flaming Shirt Incident

Someone asked me what my accommodations were like over here. They’re nothing extravagant. I live on the 14th (top) floor of Dormitory 1, where they put the scholarship students because they can charge more for the other, nicer dorms. For me, the location is great. I can sleep in until seven o’clock and still easily get to class on time.

My room is a double room, but I haven’t seen any clues that my roommate exists, other than the bicycle and clothes rack in the middle of the room. I did find a receipt dated July 19, one week before I arrived, so maybe he’s just traveling. Who knows? It’s good for me that he’s gone because I don’t sleep much here and would probably bother him when studying or writing at night. The room isn’t bad. The bed is a bit lumpy for my tastes, and the pillow more so. I have air conditioning for those days when it gets really hot outside, but most of the time I just leave the window open. The a/c dries out the air and gives me a cough.

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Inner Mongolia

Our trip to Inner Mongolia was an interesting adventure. I had thought we were going by train, but somehow I missed the memo that we were taking the bus instead. It was okay though. When you take the bus you still get to see the country (though you are much more susceptible to traffic jams).

We pulled out the south gate of the university on Friday at 12:50pm, only twenty minutes behind schedule—not bad for a group of about 45 people from all over the world. I sat in the middle seat of the back row so that I could take advantage of the leg room in the aisle (Travel tip: while this is a good strategy for short trips, on a long trip it is better to sit by the window. You have a better view for taking pictures, and it is easier to sleep).

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Chinglish of the Day

There were a couple of interesting signs at the breakfast buffet the other day:

A better translation would probably be "crispy sausages". . . .

I couldn't figure out why they would translate the left one as "mushroom rape" until I got home and looked up the characters. The one on the left is referring to rapeseed, the brassica plant similar to collard greens. It was fried mushrooms and greens. I still haven't figured out the one on the right. . . .

 

Shortcut, my a--!

I had planned to tell you today about our trip to Inner Mongolia, starting at the beginning of the trip. However, the trip home was so interesting that I wanted to tell it first.

On our trip up to Inner Mongolia, we had seen hundreds of trucks stopped on the freeway that leads to Beijing. Coming back to BLCU, our dear leader, hoping to avoid the traffic, instructed the driver to take a different route, one that cut through the mountains and would drop us  right into Beijing. We would be able to avoid the traffic jam on the main road and save ourselves a couple hours road time. If only it were that simple.

Shortly after we left Datong, we pulled off at a small rest stop to use the bathroom. The guide told us it would be six hours before we stopped again, because along this back road there were not going any good places to stop (he was wrong, there were plenty of bushes along the road). This sounded a little ominous, but I didn’t worry too much about it. Driving tractor growing up had seasoned me for long periods of sitting. However, once we got back on the road, I quickly realized that we were in for a long day.

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