So I am a little behind on blogging (Part I)

Monday  Jan 19^th  …

We had class all day…these classes are really getting in the way of our exploring J After class the dean of engineering at Jiao Tong, Dean Xi, took us out for a traditional Chinese dinner. It was delicious!!! I love having other people order for us like that; otherwise I probably wouldn’t order most of those things.  A lot of the dishes that he ordered were very spicy! I am not one for spicy foods so hopefully this trip will help me gain a little bit of a tolerance towards spice. Dean Xi was really polite, he made sure we were all taken care of and comfortable. He spoke English well.  His office is on the MinHang campus so I am sure we will be seeing more of him when we move there.

After dinner we all hung out in Kevin/Matt’s room. It was fun to just hang out and relex as a group. Eventually we ended up going out to Windows. Upon returning to campus we stopped by our favorite street food vendors and enjoyed some late night lamb and rice…street food is the best way to end the night J

Tuesday  Jan 20^th…

We started another morning sitting in Dianne’s class, but for Weiqi’s class we went on a field trip!!! Weiqi took us to a traditional tea ceremony. We took a bus to Duolun Lu, which is north of XuJiaHui in Shanghai. We tried a green tea and a chrysanthemum tea. I still prefer green tea’s however the other one was very pleasant. They played music for us and had some snacks out. After the tea ceremony we just enjoyed the tea and played some cards together.  This is a very common way for Chinese people to pass time. Before we left, we took pictures with the owners. Weiqi told us that they were going to frame the picture and post it in their stairwell…Caitlin and I are planning on going back to see if they posted it, basically to make sure we are celebrities J 

As we were walking back to the bus there were many street vendors. I ended up buying some fresh Beef Jerky. Wow, it was scrumptious! Tommy you would have loved it, since I know you love Jerky. It was like a sweet teriyaki flavor---Mmmm delicious!

We arrived back at the faculty club. My group and I met to figure out what we were going to do for our project. We got an outline figured out and divided each part up.

Later that night we were able to watch Obama’s inauguration. We had planned on going to a bar that said they would have it on for us but we ended up just staying in and watching it on the computer because the reception was actually really good.  China also had it on CCTV but they had everything dubbed over in Chinese so we didn’t want to sit through that.  For most of the pre-inauguration festivities we had a great feed through ABC.com. As soon as they started introducing everyone in front of the Capital the streaming failed. We eventually were able to pick it up again and we were able to see/hear President Obama’s speech.  Sometimes the video would freeze but we could hear what was being said so it all worked out.  Even though it turned into a late night we were happy we were able to see it, afterall it was a historic moment for the country.