Getting in the Grove

First home-cooked Chinese meal: a fish swimming in soy sauce, chicken stir-fry, and one of my favorites, eggs cooked with tomatoes.

Above is the lyrics to the song we sang for our cultural activity.

Starting class with a nice splash of color.

Today we ate a more traditional Chinese breakfast. We ate rice porridge, Chinese sauerkraut, a spicy sauce, simple buns, peaches, and vanilla yogurt. They certainly feed me well. While I was eating breakfast, I'm pretty sure they were taking pictures of me. Apparently the host families have a WeChat, a social media app commonly used in China, group chat where they share pictures and videos of their foreign student. This time I ran in the morning because we arrived at school an hour early, and then I walked to class. For lunch, I ate broccoli with garlic and dumplings. The dumplings were incredibly delicious. In the afternoon, the boys from the Welcoming Ceremony who sang "Chengdu" taught us how to sing the song. It was a bit comical because some of the boys from our group insisted on clapping obnoxiously loud whenever the boys tried to explain to us the lyrics in English with many hand motions. After singing "Chengdu" over and over and over again, each class met with a local coordinator. Class C's local coordinator is named Betty. Local coordinators help fix issues we have with our class or our host family. As of so far, I haven't really had many, if any, issues with any aspect of my new life. 吴璨 didn't have evening classes, so we went home for a delicious meal of fish, egg and tomato, and chicken, celery, and nuts. When she said we were having fish, I expected filets, or at least not the whole fish. However, there was a whole fish (see above). I must say it was quite delicious. At the end of the day, 吴璨 helped me with my homework. Having a native Chinese speaker as a sister is very helpful (I still love you Karenna even though you don't speak Chinese).