Got up at 8 ish.
Class was from 10 to 12 with Prof. Zhang. We spent the first half discussing the topics from the newspaper articles we chose. I chose one on the election,some claim that palin was sabotaging the republicans chances. Sergio brought in one on the industrial growth of XiAn.
The second half we read an article that Prof. Zhang printed out about how the milk crisis is affecting farmers. it was cool because for the most part we were actually able to read through and understand the whole thing. (As a note, it sounds like the current hypothesis on this is that everything we’re eating has melamine in it. Turns out that some derivative has been used in pesticide for a while and plants are metabolizing it.)
After class I headed over to alien street to see if I could get a Halloween costume. The last maps that I looked at for it mentioned that it was in the Russian district, but I didn’t really know what that would mean. I walked to where the place should be after getting off the subway, but there wasn’t anything there, so I walked around the side streets in the area for a while and eventually found it a couple blocks away. The area was full of fur shops filled with fur coats. Literally there would be full blocks that had nothing but these fur shops for the entire block, all with identical black fur coats.
The market was a 2 story affair full of stalls with stuff in them. It was a street market, just neatly packaged in the building. They did assume that foreigners were russian, and so the shouts to buy things came in russian rather than english. I eventually found one booth that halloween masks, but the masks were quite basic and they wanted a lot for them so I passed them on. Also in abundance were clothing, especially fur coats, bags, shoes, hats, glasses, fishing poles, toys, and more. I found eventually a zip up hoodie. It zips up all the way through the head, and has mario on it (the head has his head, the main front has his body). I got it, and was quite happy.
Wandered around a little bit more and then headed back to school. got there at around 5-ish.
Evening wasn’t particularly spectacular. I waited around for an hour or so seeing if there were people who were going to go for dinner off campus, but no group ever formed so I ended up getting some steamed buns for dinner, which were good as always.
In the evening people fooled around getting into costume for awhile, but eventually everyone was ready to head out. Our group had a panda, a biker, a pirate, a nascar driver, an artist, and a mario (me).
Went over to the cro’s nest, a pizza place near campus I haven’t been to before. Entirely foreigners there, making lots of noise and being generally roudy. I talked to one of the chinese tutors who’d come along while the others were roudy.
when the place closed at 11:30, I headed back and called it a night, the group didn’t quite have the cohesion to actually figure out anything to do for the evening.
I did pick up a ‘thebeijinger’ magazine at the place. It’s got a couple music events this month that I might try to go to (Armin Van. Bueren, DJ Shadow, and Wax Tailor). Additionally there was an ad for a second hand snowboard sale next week that I might try and got to.