A Couple Days Later

So we've spent two days in Beijing so far... and I think we are doing pretty well. The first day we spent an hour or so wandering around the area near our apartment building and then we all fell asleep in the living room for about 3 hours somehow. We woke up just in time to get ready for dinner and we ate at a great restaurant with a bunch of people from the Joint Institute at PKU. The meals here are very large and usually we order a lot of dishes and share them around the whole table.

Yesterday we went to the Forbidden City and that was very great. It is huge and it took maybe 3 hours or so to walk through most of it. I think the Emperors who lived there must have been the happiest people alive. Our language instructor, Sophia, came with to help us start to learn the language and a few other people from the Joint Institute came as well. We got a lot of pictures but I'm still not sure how to post pictures on here because everything is still in Chinese on my computer screen right now.

We bought cell phones yesterday too... which took a long time to figure out but luckily I know how to enter things in English on my cell phone now. It's pretty interesting.. you pick out a phone, then you have to buy a card with a phone number attached to it to use the phone (similar to in America)... but the phone numbers are priced differently based on how difficult they are to remember! I thought that was so unusual. So I bought a cheap cell phone number because people can just save the number so I figured nobody would notice. But then the first person I gave my cell phone number to was Ma Wudan from the Joint Institute and the first thing she said was... "tough to remember!" I couldn't really believe it! I can't imagine anyone in America worrying about how tough my cell phone number was to remember.