Tales from Tianjin

Its been a ridiculously long time since I posted - I blame this on the fact that I had very little to complain about. I managed, soon after the last post, to solve my food woes, with the following trilogy of questions/statements:

I am vegetarian.

No meat. No fish.

Is this vegetarian? No meat, no fish?

I've therefore been eating well, in fact, I've branched out to ordering specific things, like corn or mushrooms, where I would have formerly been content with just vegetarian.

China has been fun. This country also seems to have a rapidly increasing divide between rich and poor - a cup of coffee in some coffeeshops can cost as much as RMB68. (Yup. That is $8.50. No typo there.) At the same time, I can walk to the neighboring market and eat - bread, dumplings, noodles, more food than I can eat, and pay as little as RMB 2, or RMB 3. I've never thought of Starbucks as the cheap coffee option, but it really seems to be the cheapest large cup of coffee in China.

On weekends, I've roamed not so far and wide - mostly to Beijing, which is fun, expensive and chockful of entertainment options. I've seen mostly everything I wanted to see - the only thing that remains is a trip to the (heavily restored) section of the Great Wall near Beijing.

Other weekend trips have included Xi'an - home to the Terracota Soldiers, and also a smallish Chinese city with a distinctly cool, student vibe. We also went to Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall meets the sea, encircles the town and forms part of the town wall, before rising into the mountains. I've photos of all these things, I'm just running behind on posting them. I'll fix that soon.

Six weeks of Chinese later, my brain is full, my Chinese, terrible. I can form sentences expressing my wants and needs, but when people reply, I have no idea what they say. I'm still pleased though, mostly because I'm getting, as mentioned above, vegetarian food.

Tianjin doesn't have a lot of entertainment options - it seems like. For a while, I tried frantically to find stuff to do. I'd accost random people on the street, and passionately ask them where they hung out. A few weeks of unsatisfactory answers later (in their dorms, in the library, etc.) I sadly abandoned the quest. On the other hand, homework (when I do it) doesn't leave a lot of time for hanging out. However, all in all, its been a good time.