Whew. Excepting for the fact that I’ve been AWOL for the past two weeks, everything here is going great. My computer is finally working again after I bought a new hard drive at 中关村 across the street, although I did somehow manage to lose the video of Kirk talking abous 辫子s–that was truly an amazing clip. Unfortunately it was written over by another, less important, clip of a tour of a bathroom. Actually, I take that back, the bathroom clip is pretty sweet. I didn’t take it though, 新侃 did, so he gets all the credit.

Anyways, the last week has been getting a hell of a lot colder, which especially sucks being that I don’t have that much cold weather clothing here. Looks like I’m going to need to buy some.

Well, yesterday, 新侃 and I went to 师大 to meet up with one of my PiB teachers–刘安敏. We walked around the campus a bit and my roommate might have thrown too much information to her face about exactly the type of Chinese I had been learning lately. In fact I don’t even know the characters for these words so even if I wanted to write about them here I wouldn’t be able to. We went to her dorm, the entrance of which was the home of a prominent sign which forbade men from entering the women’s rooms. Damn. In any case, we sat down in the common room, if it could be called that, and talked for a little bit.

We went to lunch not long after (actually, it was kind of long after, because I was the one asked to find a restaurant, and unfortunately the only restaurants I really know in the 师大 area are those that we all went to during the summer with our teachers for Chinese language table–this is excepting McDonald’s, of course). Then 新侃 forgot about some meeting that he had agreed to go to at 2, so we had to run out a bit early. Whatevs.

The rest of the day was good, with another excursion off-campus (eating some good ol’ 菠萝饭). And then after dinner I had this PKU-Yale meeting which was explaining the program to some PKUers–yeah, I was the only white guy there. Although towards the end of the meeting, I was asked to say something in Chinese, to which I promptly stated the unofficial motto of 元培 college: 猥琐是一种气质，自恋是一种美格。

And with that, I am going.