Got up at 8 am, since class wasn’t until 10. Dealt with email for a bit. Chatted with one of the guys I met at the taiji class, and arranged to meet with him and walk over to the taiji club practice tomorrow evening.
Then walked over to the bank and withdrew some money before class. (The first atm didn’t actually have any cash in it, but the second one I tried worked fine.)
Class was with prof. zhang, and it turns out that our plan for fridays will be to learn colloquial chinese expressions. today we went through common forms of greetings, thanks, ‘see you later’s, wish you well’s, sorry’s, and anger. It was interesting, lots of modifications of the forms, similar to the various slang we have around all of those expressions.
After class I started heading over to the capital museum. It ended up with max, rebecka, sergio, and jeremy wanting to come. However, rebecca max and sergio were still dealing with finishing their homework, so jeremy and I took the subway and told them to call us when they got there.
The museum was huge. I spent about 3 hours going through it (admission was free, I registered online about a week ago to reserve tickets.) The coolest stuff were the galleries of ancient paintings and calligraphy. The other group got there about an hour after us.
Lots of stuff from the museum, I’ll post some of the photos I took soon, but it was a very cool place.
Came back, and a large group of most of our program ended up coming with me to an indian place I found online. $80 kuai for an indian buffet, in the northeast part of the city. The food was really good, and I stuffed myself on it. The restaurant was on lucky street, as it said online, but that turned out to be a street, tucked behind a fairly non-descript park that was just a row of cool looking international restaurants. I’d definitely consider going back to the area.
Got back at about 10. Most people still don’t seem to have gotten their internet working for whatever excuse, so I let a couple use my computer for a while. Tried unsuccessfully to run a program called pps, which is theoretically one of the best ways to get movies here. (our teacher recommended it.) Sadly it’s windows only. When trying to emulate it it turns out that it’s based on maze, the program developed by the university.
Talked for a while with some of the others. Rebecka and I went through some of our shared acquaintances (she knew laurel from scds, who I vaguely remember.) Also she taught for a couple years as a snowboard instructor at fiorini.
I’ll try to post another post specifically on the capital museum with some additional photos, along with the art district we’re going to tomorrow.