Friendship Hotel

I'm residing in a foreign dormitory called the Friendship Hotel. Its amazing the diversity of students living here. On Thursday night, we went to a birthday party for a girl from Dominica (NOT the Dominican Republic), its an island near St. Lucia. I made the mistake of asking her about the DR and was immediately handed a map. Anyhoo, there are people from Mozambique, Liberia, Russia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Korea, Japan, and Somalia. Before coming here, I never thought that there would be such a random assortment of nationalities here.

Saturday was an adventure in my apartment and out and about downtown. First on my to-do list was laundry. Luckily I have a washer in my apartment, but everything is in Chinese Characters! I managed to figure out what the settings meant through pictures, but still I had no clue what was going on in my bathroom.

Afterwards I headed downtown to explore and came across this performance on stage with this little boy grooving along with them. The city is mildly overwhelming. All of my senses are stimulated, as the streets are bustling with people, kabob and other food items.

The shopping here is immense. There a plethora of clothing, shoe and sporting good stores. This makes me pretty happy and its fairly inexpensive. Some of my college friends took a course aptly named "Great Ideas" which was basically Physics for Arts majors and was a running joke for a while. Anyhoo, I was in a mini-mall which had a great idea! Free lockers were provided for your items and you pushed a button which gives you a receipt with a bar code on it. When you return, you just scan the bar code and it opens up your locker!

For dinner, 2 Japanese teachers invited us out to a Japanese Restaurant. Prior to the meal, I was a bit skeptical about eating Sushi in Jilin, but I figured that I'd judge the quality of food based on the appearance of the eatery. Plus, my family in HK were adamant about me not eating any type of raw fish unless it was at a 4star hotel. But I figured if the Japanese people trust the fish here then it must be alright. There were 12 of us, a mix of Americans, 1 Canadian, 3 Japanese teachers and a few native Jiliners. We had a feast. We ordered the buffet and we housed a good amount of food. It was a fun night because we made some friends outside of school.

So its been a week since I've arrived and so far so good. The Canadian woman (who incidentally has a penchant for punching people in the back) had mentioned that the 'Honeymoon' phase for her lasted several months, when she arrived a couple of years ago. Thus, I think that I'll be pleasantly surprised by Jilin for a while, but that might cease with the arrival of the friggin' cold weather. I think I was in denial about how cold it would get here. Everyone was telling me its extremely cold here, and I kind of blew them off, but now I'm beginning to realize that I'm in for a long winter!