Today was the last day of first session classes!! We learned some practical Chinese and a song in class today, and our bargaining phrases got us candy and seaweed. Our TA gave a presentation based on her trip to Hongzhou from last June, and it was a generally fun yet bittersweet class. I am seriously going to miss this teaching team. The public health exam was answering four of six questions in essay format. They each addressed some topic covered in the course, the Lancet articles, or both, and then asked for a description of the issue and proposed solutions. It was straightforward, which I appreciated. As an afterthought, though, I realized that my Chinese professors may not be able to read my cursive handwriting, but that's how I hand write essays. If they can't read it, we'll figure it out.
This afternoon, I ran errands with Maddy and then realized how much organizing I needed to do so I could pack for my week-long vacation. However, I had little time to deal with it because I was meeting Maddy, Helen, and Julia for dinner at 6:15. We were going to meet Helen's cousin in Wangfujing, and I quickly realized that on the last night of the entire group being together, we were having dinner in the same group as the first night we had to figure out our own dinner plans (Helen's cousin included).
Wangfujing is such a cool area. It is described as the Times Square of Beijing. The subway station is under a shopping mall that has western-style stores, and there are a lot of American stores like Gap, Zara (well, this one may not be exactly American, but they have it in America and it's not Chinese), and Forever 21 on the main road. We walked past the Dong Hua Men Night Market on the way to dinner, which was on my tourism list but I didn't think I'd get to it.
We ate dinner at a pretty great restaurant. I don't know what it's called, but we ate delicious food. The table was set with single use place settings that were wrapped in plastic and the walls had a shimmery silver circle patterned wallpaper. We ate cold peanut salad, the most delicious cabbage salad I have ever had and I want to eat it all the time, a cold sampler plate that I didn't eat much of, a tofu dish, peas and beef, Sichuan spicy beef, and fish head Beijing style with pancake. The sauce from the fish was extremely delicious, and the pancake is for dipping in the sauce. Maddy got to complete her goal of eating a face by eating the cheeks, eye, and tongue of the fish. I like fish, but here there are always a lot of bones, whereas in the US the fish tends not to have bones. The cabbage was my favorite, but the pancakes dipped in sauce were a close second tied with the peas.
Before and after dinner we walked through the Dong Hua Men Night Market. This is a row of food stalls that sell the things you think of when expecting exotic food in China: silk worm chrysalis, sheep testicles, starfish, scorpion, every type of tentacle. We didn't get that adventurous because we ate a safe dinner in a restaurant, but Maddy got a coconut to drink and disappointing fried banana that trickily didn't have any banana, and Helen drank a plum juice that had dry ice in it. The dry ice thing was really cool; the cloud of steam from it hitting the liquid poured out of the opening of the lid of the cup and the cup was clear so you could see it billowing from the liquid. When Maddy didn't have enough hands to eat her banana and carry her coconut, I held the coconut for her, and she called me the "Coconut Steward." I really liked the title, so it became the title of tonight's post.
After walking around Wangfujing some more, passing a church with a group of dancers who looked like they were having zero fun whatsoever doing a dance that looked wonderfully fun and a group of people singing about how much they love Beijing, I hopped on the subway home to get ready for my week-long voyage to the South.
Tomorrow, I'm getting on a train that will go overnight to Huangshan (the Yellow Mountain), then it will be a few days of hiking and nature toursim before coming back to Beijing on the train for another four-week session of classes.
Since this next week is vacation, I will not have internet access, and therefore will not be posting until I return from the trip. I will post about vacation when I get back.
Today is awesome because of finishing classes, being the Coconut Steward, and accidental tourism accomplishments.
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