New friends

One of the best parts of ACC, the program I'm doing, is that it gives you lots of opportunities to find out about life in China by introducing you to lots of Chinese people. First of all, even though most of us live on campus, we're all assigned a Chinese host family. We're encouraged to get to know the host family by visiting their homes and eating meals with them as often as possible.

I met my Chinese host family last Sunday night. There's three people in the family: the father is probably about 60 and has been driving forklifts for the same newspaper company for 30 years. The mother is retired, and I haven't met her because she's been in the southern part of China traveling with friends. There's one 25 year-old son, who graduated university three years ago and has been working for Panasonic for the last 3 years: interestingly enough they're doing lots of technology work for the upcoming Olympics.

I met them at their apartment, which was within walking distance of my dorm. I'd describe the apartment as neat, classy, and filled with lots of expensive electronics. They had a huge Sony TV, Bose speakers, and even a Karaoke system. They had some Chinese art around the room, but what caught my eye was a relatively large replica of New York's famous “Wall Street Bull.” It was about the size of a small TV- hardly a tourist trinket, and definitely an interesting piece for this modest Chinese apartment.

After we drank tea at the apartment, we headed over to a hotpot restaurant for dinner. Hotpot is one of my most favorite culinary discoveries here (although I think they have it in North America)- each person gets a pot of soup that's heated to a boil by a small flame throughout the meal. Then you order plates of thinly sliced raw meat that you toss in the boiling pot and cook fairly quickly (5-10 seconds). Then you take out the cooked meat and dip it in delicious peanut sauce. In typical Chinese generous host fashion, my host family ordered 6 huge plates of beef for the three of us, which we did not even come close to finishing.

During dinner, my host-brother showed me pictures from his visit to the new Olympic stadium- the “bird's nest”- which got me really psyched about being here for the games, and actually even seeing them: my dad and I have got tickets for 5 nights of track and field at the Bird's nest, which I think is going to be fantastic.

Anyways, this post took a little longer to write than I was expecting- I'm going to post what I have now, go to the gym and work out, then come back and write for a while until the Yale-Princeton squash match starts at 12PM EST, 1AM China time.