Wee! Yet another fun weekend come and almost gone. I’ll start with Friday since Friday is a very good place to start.
After our test I followed my typical Friday pattern. Walk back to the dorm, go on the computer for an hour or two, tell myself I’ll sleep for an hour and end up sleeping for 4, wake up and walk dazedly into someone’s room where I listen to what plans have been concocted for that evening. Adam always seems to catch me right as I’m stumbling out of the room and usually remarks on how awake I am right after I nearly crash into a wall.
We went out to a KTV place with all our professors and later dragged them to our usual club hang out. KTV is a karaoke chain that lines the streets in every Chinese city we’ve been to (all two of them). It’s almost like a hotel, with private rooms you rent out and you can order food and drinks, etc. There’s a TV screen where the words scroll across along with random pictures to the songs your singing. Most of them involved some scantly clad woman leaning against a railing looking forlorn. Or dogs. There was quite a few of people petting dogs. Which is strange when you’re singing Country Road or songs by the Beatles. Some of the songs were hard for us to sing since they would scroll the words in Chinese characters…most of us could go “ni!” once in a while with those kinds of songs.
It was a lot of fun, probably because one or two people were really into it and our professors were so cute. Two of them did a duet to a song (that we now have the first 2 lines imbedded in our minds and break out into whenever we hear the words in normal conversation-“No problem! Really no problem!”) and were actually quite good. I’d gained a reputation for singing several weeks ago since I find it fun to take sentences and fit them to any tune. It generally comes out garbled and mostly in gibberish, but that does not detract from my amusement.
They didn’t want to go to the club and we all but dragged them with us. None of them are really the party animal type. Some of them had never been dancing before! Not that I’ve been really either; maybe 8 or 9 times, at least half of which have been during this summer.
We also got there really early, maybe 10 o’clock, so there was no body dancing yet. Waiting for other people to start would have taken too long and our teachers’ little interest that there was would have been utterly killed, so we owned the dance floor for the first half hour. Myself, Jeronimo, and Adam got the party started and again dragged our teachers on to the dance floor. They would try to escape every once in a while but we’d catch them before they got too far. Of course, a few were painfully awkward at first but eventually found their stride and after an hour they were the ones dragging us back to the floor when we took a break. It was probably the best Friday night of the entire summer.
The next day we all got on a bus (which still is quite scary and even in sleep I feel slightly nervous when the bus jerks or sways violently) and headed to a place called Penglaige. I don’t believe it has an English translation but if you were to look up the place where the Eight Immortals flew/jumped(?) into the sea, you could probably find it online.
It’s a very picturesque place, with sea cliffs and turquoise blue ocean complete the city right on the coast. There’s also the hundreds of peddlers since it is a tourist destination. We weren’t there too long but we did hike up to a pavilion where you could overlook the entire coast side and tie red ribbons to the railings for luck and wishes. Lazy people had the option of taking a gondola up (which I really would have loved to do instead but our headmaster was all gung-ho about the climbing).
There were a bunch of motor boats zipping up and down the shore, which at first I thought was probably a huge pollution factor. But then we got to ride on one and I stopped caring completely. They were taking people up to the famous part of the cliff where it was said the Immortals flew/jumped into the sea and a dragon could be seen snaking around the wall. I didn’t see either, but the cliffs were pretty cool.
I believe after that I took another nap. I’ve been taking naps all the time now, it’s a bad habit to get into since once I get back to school I’ll have no more time to take naps. Then we had dinner and hung out in someone’s room until about midnight playing chess, chatting, and listening to music. At midnight we decided that a trip to the beach was in order.
Perhaps I should mention one area in which Chinese and American dorms differ…Chinese dorms lock at night. As in, past 10:30-11ish you cannot leave or get back into the dorm. We were lucky since there were ladies that lived there who could let us in if we rang some dinger. Regular Chinese students just can’t be out past 10:30. This might explain why the nightlife in China seems to be a little lacking-all the people who are young enough to actually enjoy life are stuck inside. Not that I’m saying people over college age can’t enjoy life…they just don’t go to dance clubs or bars.
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