I should post things more often!!

On Tuesday two of the grad. students from my lab took Brian and Tiffany and I out for lunch at a pizza buffet. They had tons of great food, I especially liked these chicken on a stick things (and so did everyone else). People would pile like 20 of them on a plate. It was a pretty interesting place and it was very loud b/c there as a group of middle school students there, I’d guess maybe they were mostly around 16 or 17 years old, and there was also all the beer you could drink on tap. So they were taking advantage of that and everyone had a pint size mug (or 2) in their hands full of beer at all times. A few of them were pretty much covered in beer by the end of the lunch and the floor near the drink machines was flooding with spilled drinks. I was curious about how their teachers were going to react to them all being drunk when they got back to class… anyway it’s true what they say, drinking does make you look cooler.

On Thursday we had a our usual lunch with the JI and then we went to the bank b/c we had to pay for a deposit on our apartment and then we also bought some more minutes for our cell phones. I was really surprised when I checked my balance b/c after having the phone about 3 weeks I had only spent 21 yuan or about $2.50. I mean I don’t use the phone that much here but that still seemed like very little compared to home where I think people pay that much for about 2 days of phone service.

Then on Thursday night my lab went out to dinner to celebrate the graduation of one of the PhD students. He is the first student to earn his PhD in our research group. The restaurant we went to had a karaoke thing on the TV and a couple of people sang but really not that many people wanted to try it. Oh and I also found out on Thursday that one of my friends from UM is going to be living on the Beida campus this summer and so she moved in today. Hopefully we’ll find some cool stuff to do this weekend.