study break

tomorrow's final exam will cover every lesson studied over our two months of intensive chinese instruction. ick! i am not actually too worried about the test, because i have tested well up to this point, and this grade goes to GW as pass/fail. i think it would take some major effort to fail, so there is no use in stressing out. but i'm me, and i've been reviewing and rewriting characters for the last three hours. time for a study break! and time to record some other fun study breaks taken this week.

on monday night, sue took me with her friends (who i had met before at the SUFE night-food market) for dinner in the korean area of fudan. since fudan is considered the best university in shanghai, it's naturally chockfull of korean students. there's a particular intersection nearby that is all korean bars, restaurants, clothing stores, and apartment complexes. we ate at "ing," a favorite of her friends'. considering that i grew up 5 minutes away from cerritos, i have no excuse for my lack of korean-food knowledge. i have just never eaten the stuff! obviously, one try and i was in love. surprisingly different from japanese and chinese food, but everything was delicious (plus sue can order like no other: rice noodles, beef with difference sauces and lettuce wraps, a hot-pot version of fried rice). i am giddy to know that i can go back to orange county and have equally genuine korean cuisine there. anyway, korea is all-things fashionable to young chinese people. clothing, food, whatever. afterward we went to helen's; sue's friends chilled, chatted, smoked cigarettes (more common in average college students here, i think). i really like all of them!

also on monday, i had the wild and crazy idea of introducing sue to mexican food. i realized there was no chance she had tried it before... and since i knew cantina agave was amazing, i decided to take her there tuesday! she got really excited because i explained that mexican food is america's "sichuan food"... really flavorful, spicy, and not too expensive. californians can't live without it. so on tuesday we took the metro all the way down to the french concession along with michelle perdomo (a spicy latin mix herself!) and her chinese roommate estella (zhouying). we ordered chinese style- a bunch of things for everyone to share... taco, enchilada, burrito, nachos, salsas, and various flavored margaritas. they were stunned. then they started raving. my favorite quote might be "this is called mexican food but it is surely magic food!" all the better for my plan to convince sue to come to the west coast for grad school rather than the east.

because i was raised in a chinese family, i already knew that food is the way chinese people show they care about one another. but being here, and experiencing it with a peer, is pretty fun and endearing. tonight sue wants to take me with her friend yu "fish" to a yunan restaurant because i have never tried the cuisine. fish is by far my favorite of her friends, she's hilarious, eats everything in sight, and actually writes "Fish" on the resumes she sends to english-speaking companies. so tonight, the three of us will go to wujiaochang, and feast once again (i don't even want to talk about how many miles a day i am running in this heat to make up for my chinese social life). there, sue's also going to help me pick out a host gift for estella's family in chengdu, because i will be visiting them for dinner one night. food and relationships (关系 guanxi)... that's what china is all about :) can't wait!