September 12th

Everyone,

I’m in China!!! It has been almost a week now, and I’m really loving it! I have own apartment now that I share with two other girls- Juliana Murray from Washington DC, and Geneva Scaife from Washington State. Juliana I knew from my year of Chinese studies at BYU, and Geneva is a new friend I’ve made since. Juliana is 23 and pretty spunky, and Geneva is 25 and super super spunky! I love them both am excited to be here! School started Monday and is a little challenging, but mostly fun. I like that I’m improving my Chinese in school and outside school. I do hang out with many other foreigners from the program, but I’m hoping to make some new Chinese friends soon! Geneva and I had a really fun time walking around an alley near where we live and chatting with a lao ban (store owner) who was manning a fruit stand. He seemed to think my Chinese was pretty good, but alas, Chinese people always say that because they try to be nice to the people who will give them money. Geneva tries to contradict my statement, but since she’s still a beginning Chinese-speaker, she has not yet realized how much I need to improve. But I did have a nice and fairly long conversation, which was really really fun!! I haven’t been speaking too much Chinese lately because of all the need to settle in and start school, but I’m sure I will have plenty of opportunities in the very near future. So in case anyone was wondering, I haven’t gotten sick yet or eaten any extremely weird things. My favorite foods here have been baozi ( a steamed bun with meat or vegetables inside), which are usually only five mao apiece (which translates to 7 cents!!!), and beef in soup with noodles, which is usually about 87 cents. And two baozi or a bowl of beef noodle soup totally fills you up!!! So on average, I spend less than five dollars on a whole days worth of food (drinks are a little more expensive…which means about 40 cents). Pretty funny huh? So when I went to a night market and finally bargained some earrings down to 20 yuan, I felt like I was splurging major!! But in actuality, that equals a little less than 3 dollars… and they are nice earrings! So life is different here, but some things are the same. Phones are expensive (I have to buy a new one because my old one from America doesn’t work here, and it cost me 430 yuan for a phone, a sim card, and 650ish minutes, roughly cost me 62 dollars), housing is semi-expensive, as are some items like foreign shampoo and snicker bars. But a bus ride cost about 28 cents on average, my text books were like five dollars, and my friend bought a Chinese to English pocket dictionary for 75 cents!!! So things are pretty cool J I also bought a really cute skirt for about 6 dollars and a tailored tai chi outfit (for my tai chi class!) for 20 dollars! It’s pretty sweet. Well, sleep time so peace out and keep it real!
Love,
Brooke