Start of the Second Semester

So to celebrate our return home, HBA takes us to this acrobatics show. It reeks with pandering to tourists and the show starts off with some the artists in borderline offensively primitive outfits. But as the show goes on I can't help being amazed by all the different stunts and the skills of the performers.

Homework is still as abundant as ever but it's getting a little bit easier to remember new vocab/grammar. Maybe my Chinese mind is working better (knock on wood).

After our first weekly test of the second semester we made dumplings. All of us. Like one insanely large, partially Chinese family. It was cute.

Then I went to Silk Market. Which is now just a giant mall of little booths selling the same bootleg stuff. It was fun haggling but really time-consuming and tiring towards the end.

We literally spend half of our time shopping just arguing about prices. They would first enter some ridiculously high price into their calculator, and then we would erase it and enter what we're willing to pay. The difference was pretty large. A) because they thought we were stupid 外国人(foreigners) who would actually pay 300 yuan for a tshirt. and B) because we were particularly good hagglers who would start off with ridiculously low prices that were often 10% of what they originally asked for. After pretending to be upset and starting to walk away we would usually get the item for pretty close to what we asked for because our "chinese was so good" or in the case of Liz and me because we "are such beautiful girls."

To finish off a fun day we went to Houhai. Which is basically this area by the lake lined with pretty chill bars. It was beautiful and relaxing.