Got up at around 8. Spent the morning fairly relaxed. Studied some chinese. Did the calligraphy homework. Did a bit of math homework. Surfed the web and read the magazine I brought back yesterday.
Joe stopped by at lunch and invited me to go to a dumpling making event mid afternoon. Did a bit more studying until then, and then went over with him at two.
There were about 15 people, a mix of other international students (probably half) and chinese students. Everyone had really good english, so most of the talking was in english, but we made a bunch of dumplings.
This happened in the main dining area of the dumpling dining hall (one of the student cafeterias where the only thing on the menu is dumplings.) After we made them, the staff at the cafeteria cooked them for us, and we ate them. Lots of dumplings, and they were really good. The chinese student leader guy (his english name is mike) had made the fillings earlier, there was a eggplant one, an egg with ertou (a black mushroom that I haven’t seen in the US), a pork and radish, and a fourth one I’m forgetting.
Met a bunch of interesting people there, a chinese PHD student who’s working in Database design (there’s a project to build a new chinese optimized database starting with postgresql). There were also japanese and korean foreign students studying chinese, both of whom were already essentially fluent (they were doing research in chinese at least, and expected to be reading books.)
went back to the dorm and didn’t do a whole lot more this evening. Got a bit more studying done, and surfed the web for a while. I’m planning to go down to the main shopping area in beijing tomorrow since I haven’t been there. I haven’t been able to study the new chinese for monday yet either since they haven’t given us those words yet, hopefully I also get them tomorrow.