Yesterday wasn’t extremely exciting, so I’ll keep it short. My mom’s cousin picked me up at my place and she treated me to lunch and took me to her place for dinner. Along the way we picked up a really sweet electronic dictionary, but sadly for 2000RMB (waving to money flying out the window). It’s really nice though because it can switch between simplified and traditional Chinese. English, Mandarin, and Cantonese spoken pronunciation, and has 10 languages to Chinese and reverse. I could have gotten a color one for 100 bucks more but the only difference is that it was in color.

I’ve realized that I’ve spent more money on calling cards than I should calling home so I need to watch my minutes. They only sell 100rmb cards and calling home is about 1rmb a minute. And 10 minutes goes by pretty fast…

So far the first week I’ve been in Beijing I’ve spent a total of 1400rmb, so 60rmb on school food, 130 on grocery related stuff, 600 on phone related stuff (140 sim card, 560 on phone cards), and the rest on like miscellaneous stuff like street food, drinks, and my sunglasses. I haven’t even added the tuition, plane ticket, or housing fees cuz I don’t want to make myself cry…

This morning there was someone knocking on our door for a couple minutes and I finally got up and opened and it was someone I didn’t know, and in Chinese he asked me if my roommate was sleeping and Andy came to the door and told me he didn’t know the guy…weird, but both of us were annoyed because it was 7am on a weekend morning..ugh…

Later on, I went out and wandered around some more and found this small mall area with a bunch of clothes and shoes for sale and I bought myself a notebook for writing down words and characters that I see and hear in class but aren’t part of class just to extend my vocab a bit, and a folder for papers and stuff, both were 15rmb. Above the mall was the fitness center I was looking for because since the gym at school had to close because of the Olympics (???) people have to go to this one. It seemed ok but its 1100 rmb for 3 months, so right now I’m trying to decide if I should spend my 160 on working out for the first time since before finals in November or spend it on food which will in turn make me fat…decisions decisions…