The Russian Nesting Dolls of Community Levels
Us trying to look like Kung Fu masters.
Close up on my Kung Fu attempts.
Exciting update! My host sister, 吴璨, is going to be a peer tutor in my class. Every class has around five peer tutors, which are students that attend the Experimental School of Suangliu Middle School and wanted to volunteer to help us out. Many of them are host siblings, but some of them are not. After a full day of morning and afternoon classes, we had our last Kung Fu class. I learned a few simple moves, but I am still just a measly grasshopper. Trying other sports just further my love of running because running is one of the most simple sports out there. You can do it practically anywhere, wearing practically anything, and it only require moving your legs and pumping your arms. As usual, my host dad drove 吴璨 and I home. I ate some grapes and did my homework, and then we had a delicious dinner of taro and cabbage, the orange squash that is supposedly pumpkin, chicken legs, and a spicy dish of pork and vegetables. The pumpkin, cabbage, and taro are some of my favorites because they aren't oily at all and are very soft and flavorful. My host mom cooks the taro and cabbage in a broth that adds to the natural vegetable flavor. I'm very proud of myself today because I successfully used chopsticks to eat a chicken leg. It is not easy. After dinner, 吴璨, my host mom, and I headed to a bakery to buy some bread for lunch tomorrow. Typically, the school provides lunch for us, but tomorrow we're heading to the Panda Research Base in Chengdu and Kuan Zhai Alleys. I think I'm going to bring milk, bread and peanut butter, and some fruit for lunch. At the bakery, there were a few nice looking cakes, some cookies, pastries, and two small loaves of bread. In America, I generally only eat whole wheat bread, but they only had milk bread and a type of honey bread. I went for the milk bread, which looked like white bread, but I think it has more flavor. On our way back from the bakery, we saw a large group of mainly older women dancing, which is a pretty common occurrence. My host family, like many other host families, lives in a 小区, which is pretty much a gated community of apartment buildings with some shops and a few squares. At 8:00 pm at night, there were many people out and about in addition to the dancers. There were the shop owners, customers, dancers, walkers, motorcycle and three wheel car drivers, and many little kids wandering about. Each community like this is like a mini city inside the bigger one. It goes from the country to the region to the province to the city to the district to the little community, like this one.