My daily life here

Sorry I haven't posted anything in a week.  Last week was pretty busy with homework and then we left on a 3 day field trip and I'm only just feeling caught up.  The field trip will be in a separate post.

The school aspect of this adventure is going well overall.  My Chinese is getting a tiny bit better, although I don't know how much of it will stick with me very long.  I spend 3 hours every morning in language class and then I've been spending a couple of hours every day doing homework - either reading/writing work or learning new characters for a quiz. Our teacher has gotten into a habit of giving us a quiz on characters pretty much every day, so that means learning 15-30 new characters or words per night.  Might not sound too bad, but we have to be able to write them from memory.  Some of the ones from the quiz this morning:
地图 = map
红路灯 = traffic light
Can you tell that the chapter was on giving/getting directions?

In the afternoons, I get lunch and then sometimes I do homework, sometimes I do some shopping errands.  Today I took the bus to a big store to do some grocery shopping.  I felt a huge sense of accomplishment that I was able to do that successfully without any disasters along the way, especially since I hadn't ridden that particular bus route before.  You never realize how much your life revolves around being able to read things (signs, packages of food,...) until you can't really do it.  And since I can only minimally communicate with people, I can't really ask them for help either (well, I can probably ask, but won't understand anything they say back!!).  Pictures and landmarks become really important in daily life.

An area close to campus where there are lots of restaurants in a row.  Most of the seating is outside.  I took this photo while waiting for my dumplings to be ready at the yummy dumpling shop.

A more upscale part of the city with fancier shops and restaurants.  The green cars are taxis and they're everywhere.

I didn't take any pictures of the grocery store items today (mostly because I already get stared at enough - why add to it with my camera out at the store), but some of it is really entertaining, especially when there are little snippets of English.  For example, the potato chip flavors are much different from the US.  This one is tomato ketchup flavor.  Today I saw cucumber flavor and a bunch of others that are a tad weird for my tastes.

Other interesting things at the Chinese grocery store:

• there was an entire aisle (both sides) of rice - everything from fill your own bag, to what had to be 50 lb + bags
• you can buy live fish there for dinner
• milk seems like it only comes in single serve juice boxes that are not refrigerated and there was most of an aisle of choices.  I couldn't read the packages there, so I don't know why there was so much
• there were lots of junkfood aisles, though most of it was not anything you would see in the US - lots of things that looked a bit like beef jerky, but had words like 'rabbit' and 'duck liver' and other assorted odd choices.  Plus a lot of sugary sweets too. 
• you have to ask for, and pay for a bag to put your groceries in.  I suppose that's probably a good thing overall, but different from what I'm used to.
• this store was two levels and had ramp-like moving sidewalks to go between floors.  The wheels on the cart were weird and it wasn't until I went between floors that I figured out why - they were magnetic and stuck to the moving sidewalk when you were on it, so that your cart wouldn't roll.  Pretty cool!