Birthday and Beihai

Well, it's been about a week since I last posted, and most of that week was fairly uneventful. Recently our class has been spending a lot of time on homeworks and projects, and we have our final project presentation (on Tuesday) and final exam (on Wednesday) rapidly approaching. In just 48 hours I will be done with the class! Remind me never to voluntarily take a differential equations class again....although I suppose it build character.

The week was fairly uninteresting, but this past weekend was awesome. After class on Friday I had a group meeting that was thankfully very short, so I got most of the afternoon to relax. Friday evening we left campus around 6:00 to go out for the evening. We first went to karaoke again, although a different place this time. It was much larger and had a better music selection, although yet again the music videos that went along with the songs were usually quite strange (I think that's the first time I have ever seen a pop song set to clips of wildlife).

After karaoke we went to a club near campus. Since the closest I have ever been to clubbing was probably high school prom, it was needless to say and interesting experience. It is definitely not a Chinese thing to do; most of the people we saw there were foreigners. It was fun though, and surprisingly most of the people in our group were not bad at dancing (who would have expected that from a bunch of math and engineering majors?). A few of the local students came as well, two girls who we see often outside of class and are getting to know fairly well, and also another guy who I think was from our class.

When we left the club we were all hot from dancing, so we hung out at a bubble tea place that we found next door. It took a long time to get the drinks we had ordered (I had green tea with aloe cubes, which sounds bizarre but was very good), so by the time we got them someone realized that, since it was past midnight, it was my birthday. After a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday which seemed to scare the waitresses quite a bit, we hung out for a while longer before heading back to campus.

The next morning we met at 6:00 am at one of the campus gates (which meant that I got about three hours of sleep that night) to go downtown to Beihai, which means North Sea. Beihai is right next to the Forbidden City, and has a lot of lakes, flowers, old buildings, and such. I think someone said that it was the old palace, and that the emperor used to hang out there a lot. It was a gorgeous day, and since we left so early we got to see a lot of the area before it got too hot. We also went boating on the lake, at which point I really wished that I had a sunbrella (Chinese people carry umbrellas almost all the time, whether to block rain or sunshine), since I got nicely sunburned from the sun reflecting off the water.

Around lunch time we left Beihai, and walked to lunch. By that point it was hot and we were all tired from the long morning and lack of sleep, so by the time we got to the restaurant we were all sort of dead. The restaurant, however, was extremely nice. It was Muslim, and I think over 250 years old. They had extremely good lamb, which I have never had until this trip.

After lunch, most of us headed back to campus since we were so tired. I got to take a nice long nap in between getting back and dinner. After dinner, I came back to my room with two classmates to try to get some work done on one of our projects. We worked for half an hour or so and got nowhere, so when two other classmates came in and told us that everyone was studying for the final in another room on our floor, we gladly went with them. I got my notebook and stuff together, and went over. When I got there, I walked into the room to find, not the usual huddled masses of people trying to figure stuff out, but a dark room, a birthday cake, and everyone singing Happy Birthday (for the second time that day). I was extremely surprised (I had no idea they were planning anything), and also very happy not to be studying on my birthday.

After taking pictures of all of us with the cake, we cut the cake and then Wei, who was helping me cut it, smeared a little icing on my face (we were using very flimsy plastic utensils, so we were both sort of messy. I, or course, had to return the favor. Normally at home that's where it would have ended, but apparently Chinese (at least Wei's family) go a little bit crazier. Things escalated into a full scale icing battle all the way down our hallway on the fifth floor. Three of the the girls hid in the downstairs laundry room, so after one of the more "trustworthy" members of the group coaxed them out we covered them in icing as well, making the fourth floor a mess too.

We finally cleaned everything up (which took a fair amount of time as well as several rolls of toilet paper), ate the remains of the cake, and then all wandered off to our own rooms to relax for the rest of the evening.

On Sunday we mostly did schoolwork (although I did wake up Sunday morning to a beautiful bouquet of lilies from the professor who knew it was my birthday). Sadly, it's getting close enough to the final that we probably won't be doing anything too interesting in the next few days.

Wow, long post. Oh well! I probably won't update again until after the final.

Oh yea, last Thursday we finally went out for Peking Duck. I won't write too much about it right now since this is already too long, but it was very good. I never knew this but you usually eat it in a thin pancake with sauce, scallions, and cucumbers. Very tasty!