September 27th

Well, lots of things have been going on here in China, all pretty exciting and fun things!! After returning back from Huang Shan, it was kinda hard to go back to school. It feels like high school in Taiwan all over again!! Except I understand my classes this time, lol. But I’m typically in school Monday through Thursday from 8am to 5pm. Bleh eh?? But I do have a nice lunch break from 12 to 2pm. So…what have I been up to huh…hmmm…soo many things!! I guess some of the highlights would be the time the police took me to the post office, KTVing with my crazy friends, dropping laundry (and then retrieving it ) seven stories , and going to a few cool historical sites around Nanjing. So starting with my personal favorite, how exactly did Brooke manage to get a police officer to drive her to the post office? What happened was that one of my Chinese teachers had assigned us to write her and send her a letter concerning our trip to Huang Shan (Yellow Mountain). So I had written a letter, but was unaware as to where a nearby post office might be. I was walking around campus looking for one, without much success, when I thought it might be helpful to ask this police officer who looked like he was patrolling the area. So (all in Chinese mind you) I asked him if he could point me in the direction of the post office. But he was like, hey, my partner and I can drive you there if you’d like! Now normally I wouldn’t just jump into a car with some random Chinese people, but since these two were police officers (and I really wanted to drive around in a patrol car!!) I said ok and he gave me the front seat! I knew the post office was supposedly pretty close by as well, so I felt ok with it. While he was driving me there (the other officer didn’t say anything to me) we talked about all sorts of cool things! He asked me what country I was from and when I answered he said, “Oh, that makes sense because you really represent the ideal beautiful American woman” lol!!! Whatever, but it was pretty funny. And then we talked about how I had learned Chinese, he said it was really good, and then we discussed a few of the differences between Chinese and American culture. It was really fun! We arrived at the post office and he was like, I can wait here for you if you’d like, but I told him it was alright and that I’d be able to find my way back! Then he gave me his phone number so that if had any other problems or needed help with anything I could give him a call. Crazy eh? So all my friends here think its funny I have my own police taxi. But I’ll probably never call him, so meh. So Ktv…that is one of our favorite things to do for fun here! I’ve only gone twice, but we (about 12 to 20 of us) get together at a KTV place and so it only ends up being like a $1.50 to $3ish for two or more hours of singing. You really see a different side of people when they sing, its way fun! People who are usually pretty shy totally come out, singing and dancing and having lots of fun! And since we are all LDS, its clean and fun! We did join with some other foreigners once, and it was still pretty cool. We haven’t learned any Chinese songs yet, but hope to before we go home! Luckily most karaoke places (KTV stands for karaoke here) have tons of English songs that we’ve heard of . And now for the laundry…well…if you didn’t know, in China they mainly only have washing machines, no dryers. And so after you wash your clothes, you have to hang them outside to dry. My roommate, Geneva, had a lot of dry clothes hanging out, and I needed to borrow some hangers, so I was bringing them in for her. But as I grabbed one, the undershirt next to it totally fell…and I live on the seventh floor!! So I was freaking out, but it luckily caught on someone else’s clothing line before it hit the ground! So I walked down to it (no elevator in my building) and found the undershirt was on the second floor, where I couldn’t reach it without some sort of pole. So I ran back upstairs and found this bamboo pole by our door (we are the last floor and the next set of stairs up has all this left over construction junk) and ran back down. Unfortunately three Chinese people were just chilling right where I wanted to be and so I went up to them and was like, “Hey, I live on the seventh floor and my clothes fell and I need to get it….” Kind of thing and they were all like, oh!! And so I had to climb up this fence thing in order to be high enough to use the pole, and one of the guys held my pole while the other guy helped me get my footing. I was soo embarrassed, but totally appreciated all their help! So there I was, clinging to this fence thing, trying to poke the undershirt with the pole, and they were all like “almost there, a little higher, to the right!!” kind of thing (in Chinese mind you) and after several attempts I was successful!! But then I had to get down, so once again one took the pole (plus the shirt this time!!) and one helped me down. I was blushing soo bad and totally embarrassed, but it was really really funny! So those are some of the highlights from the last week and I’m excited to have more! I love you all and hope you are all doing well!!Love, Brooke