I'm exhausted, so this is going to be short and disjointed.
It was a normal school day, and I went with six other people to the Lao She Teahouse, except the travel agent messed up and we didn't actually get to go because there were no tickets. We ended up eating food from American fast food (best McFlurry of my life), and then we rode the train home for studying and sleeping.
The Teahouse is diagonally across the street from Tiananmen Square, so it was a rather bustling area. I enjoyed the company of my friends, and even though we didn't get to do the activity we initially wanted to do, it was a fun adventure anyway.
I had a difficult food day today. For breakfast, I tried Snow White flavor yogurt, and it was very bad and I couldn't eat it, so I ate an apple instead, but I was disappointed. I think eating yogurt has helped me not get sick. For lunch, they provided cheeseburgers from McDonalds and mayonnaise-slathered veggie sandwiches from Subway, and neither was even remotely appetizing, so I went to get lunch on my own. It's really hot in Beijing right now, so I noticed that I was very angry because I was hot, tired, and hungry, and I made myself calm down once I got into my air conditioned dorm room. Then we didn't go to the Teahouse, which subverted my expectations. I've been craving plain food lately, so stopping for fast food that was familiar was comforting, but I'm going to look for non-pork baozi tomorrow for dinner and Beast or plain yogurt for breakfast.
Today is awesome because I got to eat some plain food while on an adventure with friends.
Ok, now that I've slept I want to fix this.
Our Public Health lecture was the best one yet. It was quite long, but it was the first one to use qualitative data. Our professor talked about Health Promotion and addressed social determinants of health. She went through a case study of an intervention that PKU collaborated on that involved increasing health awareness and health service utilization among young migrant workers. Gu Laoshi sat in on part of the class, and when the slide had a statistic for 2-week morbidity, he asked what it meant, and as an example, he had us calculate a 2-week morbidity if 10 of the 40 students on our trip had gotten sick. It was pretty funny and a nice break from a lecture that was over 2 hours long.
I have to place a caveat here about food. I love Chinese food. When I eat it, I always enjoy it. However, after a solid two weeks of only Chinese food, I have been craving food with fewer flavors and less salt. This week, I have been snacking on cucumbers and apples because there is not simple produce in Chinese cuisine (ie, they do not eat salad or serve a steamed vegetable without added seasonings). Since the food is saltier than I'm used to, I am finding that dehydration comes faster than usual. It's not that I'm unhappy with the food here, it's that I need to find a little more variety. I mean, when we're in the states we don't eat only one type of cuisine, so I don't feel too bad that I ate American food yesterday. I did, after all, eat Chinese for breakfast and lunch, and it was delicious.
I was also really proud of myself yesterday for knowing exactly where we were upon exiting the subway. I recognized the landmarks around Tiananmen, so I easily knew which street to cross. It is always really cool when I succeed independently in China, be it with directions or with language.
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