On Saturday, the 11th I woke up a bit later than I have been, 6 am! The jet lag is getting better, slowly but surely. We had our first breakfast in our hotel/dorm. It was an interesting mixture of food: bacon, runny oatmeal, rice gruel with pickled vegetables, noodles, fried rice, hard boiled eggs, little cakes, tea and so on. Believe it or not, the rice gruel was actually really good! After breakfast we walked outside to be greeted by Shaanxi Normal University’s English Club. We were quickly partnered up with one of the students. My buddy for the day was Susan. Of course that’s not her real name, but Chinese students adopt English names to use in the English speaking world since theirs are hard to pronounce and do not translate into other languages. The same is true with our names. English names do not translate into Chinese and are hard for many of them to pronounce. So when we start language classes this week, we’ll be adopting Chinese names. Would Mao be inappropriate? 
So once we met our Chinese buddies, we walked en masse down to the building where we’ll be having our classes. It’s about a 10 minute walk from where we are staying. The campus is very nice with tree lined lanes, parks, ponds and recreation areas. We went into a conference room where we introduced ourselves and met the officials from the university. The thing that excited most of us the most was that we received our Chinese language books at this time.
After the formal welcome, we broke into small groups and walked around campus. We were shown where the laundry facilities are, both self service and the laundry service. I think I’ll be doing the laundry service, as I looked at the Chinese washing/drying machine and had no clue how to operate. It looks very different from ours and it’s all in Chinese of course. The laundry service is reasonable, less than $1 per item washed.
After our campus tour, we took our English Club buddies out to lunch to thank them for their time. We asked them to take us where they would like to go, so we went to a place off campus that the students really enjoy. We were given menus with no pictures and all in Chinese. So the students asked us what types of foods we liked, whether we wanted sweet, spicy, salty, etc. So we had a variety of great dishes, beer, juice (orange pop), soup, rice and so on. The entire meal came to 161¥, or about $23! I am blown away at how cheap things here are for us. The one thing that we as Americans need to remember though is that things aren’t necessarily cheap for the Chinese. So we need to be careful about making comments like that around the Chinese, otherwise we’ll come across as the ugly, rich Americans. 
When lunch was over, we took a walk along the main streets near the campus where there’s anything that you could want. As it was a hot day, I came back in around 4 and relaxed for a while. Near 6.30 Nicole from Texas had a gathering in her suite. The goal was to try Chinese snacks. So we walked through the store across the lane, just throwing anything into the basket that looked interesting, including “Lonely God Fried Extruded Vegetable Snack”. Nothing says heavenly like extruded snacks! I sampled just about everything, with the exception of the spicy crabs. Yes, they were little crab shells covered in spice.
Today is our first free day. After breakfast, a group of us may head into the city centre to check out the famous bell tower and the markets around it. As this is not a Christian society, there is no “everything is closed on Sunday” concept. It’s business as usual. It appears that businesses are open all the time. Even the post office is open on Sunday. I think Mom and Pop shops pick a random day to close, but for the larger stores, they only close on national holidays. I can’t wait to get out there to explore! Look for more pictures tomorrow.
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