I walked out in the morning, still feeling flushed with victory. It was the first rainy day since I have been here. Overall, the weather has been warm and muggy, but not unbearably so. Chicago was good practice in this as in many other ways. The rain was just a drizzle at first, not enough to make anything feel cleaner, if that ever happens. I decided to be adventurous: I would go out for breakfast. I first off discovered that the multitudinous cafeterias on campus are closed to me until I have a student ID: they effectively limit their customers to just students by not taking cash. So I wandered down the street. Meanwhile it started to rain hard, so I bought an umbrella from a newsstand. It is royal blue on top and silver underneath (the silver is some kind of UV protector). It is called a "sun and rain umbrella." After I got it, I sort of wished I'd got a more feminine pastel color; my hand just reaches for blue automatically, but I'm already built like a bear compared to the women here. No reason to make it worse by having a manly sort of umbrella too. Well, most guys' umbrellas don't have the silver UV shade, I've noticed, so at least there's that.
Soon I went into a little restaurant. I decided to have their breakfast special: six baozi and a bowl of porridge for 2 RMB. The porridge was sort of like cream of wheat but neither sweet nor milky. It was served with a little dish of some kind of brown bits, salty pickled something. The stuff was so bland without them that I dumped them straight in, whatever they were, and the result was quite palatable. Maybe I'd like cream of wheat better if I put brown pickled bits into it rather than milk and sugar. Chopsticks but no spoon--I guess porridge is to be drunk from the bowl.
After I got back from breakfast, I did my internet stuff and then wandered about looking for a place to get photos taken. I need 8 for registration--passport type photos. It's a good thing I waited to get them here! There was a little photo-shop in the campus Mini-mart where I ordered a sheet of 9 for only 15 RMB. I couldn't help thinking of Taiwan, where I had to do the same sort of thing but somehow ended up in a store that did graduation photos and senior portraits and such, so I got touched-up glamour shots (including making my tanned and freckled face many shades whiter and less freckly) and it cost me more than $20. Here it's just plain me for $2 or so. I just hope they're the right size. None of the school information is as informative as I might wish.
The only other notable thing I did was withdraw some money for my apartment transaction. More on that later.
I also looked in vain for a post-office. I will have to work hard and find one soon, but no luck on this occasion! I even wandered east along a big road off the south-side of campus. There I discovered that my new place is less than five minutes walk from not one, not two, but at least 3 huge multi-story bookstores. This is not counting the two university bookstores in the Mini-mart and another, actually called "The Peking University Bookstore" which I think sells products of their own press (housed in the same building). I have not gone in to any off these except the first one, as I am going to have to move soon and must force myself to resist temptation. But I will say that the money I have been saving on food is very soon going to become my book budget.
Speaking of saving money on food, I was starting to get a little hungry walking along that big street. You can tell I'm getting spoiled when I walked into a beef-noodle restaurant and found myself thinking, 8 whole RMB for a bowl of ramen? No thanks! Maybe I just didn't feel like eating ramen, though. Instead, my eye was caught by a fellow with a sizzling hot grill, making delicious looking toasted sandwiches. I know that by and large street food is a bit suspicious, but again, this fellows customers were plentiful, and the fire was very hot. Besides, the meat was a type of really salty ham, and what can go wrong with something that salty? I had a ham and egg sandwich with spicy hot pepper sauce and a bright fresh lettuce leaf on a toasted round of bread that reminiscent of a double-size English mufffin, 2 RMB (the egg doubled the price), the whole thing sizzling hot. Totally delicious, and no ill-effects thus far. I think eating even street-food ought to be okay in small quantities--I'll just sort of build up my immunities. And street food always looks so tasty.
After this I went back to my room and just hung out. It was very lazy of me, when I should have been out accomplishing things, but I just wanted to chill and do nothing. I have decided I will wait to start working on my dissertation again until I move in to my new place. I just hate to drag out all my books and papers when I'm going to have to pack them again. Besides, without internet everything would be slow and frustrating. I actually use the internet quite a lot in my work. So anyway, I read, dozed, made some lace, played around with my computer. The photo at right, by the way, is some of my recent productions. The one on the left is a fern pattern, and the one on the right is called Cluny. Which one do you like better?
Around dinner-time I ventured out. It was about 6:30. I had had the curtains drawn and it looked so dark in the room that the fact that it was still daylight came as a shock to me. I decided to explore the east edge of campus. There was nothing much there, though. All the workers were getting off work, and so there were big swarms of people waiting for buses. I had been walking south, but eventually turned west. I was sort of half-looking for the restaurant FL took me that first night, but I didn't find it. It must be on the north edge of campus? Or on some further-off side-street. Or I saw it and simply didn't recognize it. I was feeling a little glum. It's such a trade-off, whether to seek out social interactions which 9 times out of 10 cause me such intense anxiety and unhappiness, or whether to slog through the days and nights all by my lonesome, which is kind of a chronic sadness but rarely acute. Anyway, I would have been glad for someone to have dinner with, but not quite willing to go to the trouble of making that happen. At left, by the way, is a picture of my new phone. A real rock-bottom model as you can see, and nostalgically reminiscent of my old cell phone, which I gave up four years ago! Phones have got much fancier since, but you can still get a pretty simple one, as I found out.Eventually I decided to have Korean food. The waiters in the restaurant I found were very pushy, cheery, and solicitous, which I found (for once) more soothing than embarrassing. However, Koreans tend to speak a horribly incomprehensible brand of Chinese. I can barely understand a word they're saying! I think it must be because they slip back into Korean pronunciations of some of the words, which are near enough for native Chinese speakers to get it, but for me, I have no clue. To make matters worse, these Koreans had memorized and frequently employed some jolly fast-paced set-phrases in Chinese, all rhyming and elegant, but totally incomprehensible to me. The upshot of all these lingual obstacles was that while I had intended to order some comforting homey sort of food like chapjae or bebim bop, what I got instead was a rather unsettling hot-pot. This was very Chinese-y Korean food. The stock in the pot was so oily that things you stuck in were half deep-fried, half boiled. As for the things they suggested I order… heart of pig, intestine of beef… They didn't really give me time to read the menu, which I could have done albeit slowly. I settled on lamb and chicken, seaweed, and napa cabbage. I was confused about what I was even ordering (at first I thought it was some kind of appetizer, and didn't realize it was a hot-pot at all). They found the tiny quantities I asked for rather hilarious (ONLY 4 lamb sticks?), but in the event it proved more than enough! In retrospect, I think it was some kind of uneasy marriage between chigae and Chinese hot pot. You stick the raw stuff in on sticks and pull them out when they're cooked, but the broth you stick them in to is a highly spiced chigae sort of broth, which would ordinarily be stocked with slow-cooking and odiferous things.
Well, I tolerated it well enough, though it wasn't exactly what I felt like eating. It did beguile the time agreeably, and provide lots of lively social interactions, what with the waiters chanting little Chinese ditties to the effect of "eat slow slow, eat more more" or "eat good food, eat until you're full." Okay, they were real food hustlers. What else would I expect from Koreans. It was pretty funny, though I felt rather indigested afterwards.
I got back to the campus in time to see numerous fruit vendors setting up on various corners. Why to the fruit vendors come to campus at night? I didn't see anyone buying any fruit. I guess it is just one of those mysteries. Melons peaches apples plums. Naturally I was still too guilty about the grapes to make any purchases!
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