Today was just another uneventful workday in Qianfu. Ren Yan and I decided to scrap the masks we made yesterday and start fresh with simpler masks. A couple of her friends who go to school at the university across the street from SUAD came and helped us with the paper mache-ing. One of them spoke insanely good English. His name is pronounced "Ding-y." I don't know how you would spell it. The other didn't speak much English and I don't remember his name. It was nice of them to come (and they brought me a Beijing Opera mask lighter keychain! Gift giving is so huge here!) but really, they didn't do much for finishing the project faster. This is ok. I'm sure it was nice for Ren Yan to have someone to talk to while she worked. We work out in the foyer of the building and while there are a couple of other groups working out there, we're too far apart to really talk.
The cafeteria, which I have a love/hate relationship with, provided the same indistinguishable food as it has on every other day. I made the mistake of getting something vaguely western looking for lunch the other day and ended up pretty much not eating anything. Now I look MUCH more closely at what I'm picking and yesterday and today I had pretty good success with getting food that's edible. There's a fried cabbage dish that's similar to one my mom makes. There are pieces of bacon that are mostly fat in it, rather than polska kilbasa, but it's still tasty.
The mask painting is...coming along, I guess. I work much faster than Ren Yan (I finish about 3 masks for every 1 she does), but hers look like art, rather than something an elementary schooler slapped paint on. I think on Monday I will probably re-do all but one of my paintings. Jeeeeez.
On the bus ride home, Christian's partner, Fan Yei Man sat with us (most of the Chinese students live on the new campus, but a few live in Jinan, so they ride the bus home with us.) and he cracks me up. He speaks pretty good English, but he gets flustered and/or confused pretty easily and ends up accidentally saying funny things. The other Chinese students apparently call him "Show Man" (the pronunciation is closer to chow mein than anything else), which means "short" because he's the youngest of them. He's 20. I remember being 20 and the youngest. But that was a little different because in China, he can get a beer anywhere he wants (including in the cafeteria!) and when I was 20, I couldn't really drink with my of-age friends.
Tomorrow, we have the morning off to go to a spring (Jinan is famous for its springs) and a mountain. Then in the afternoon, we're doing Karaoke with the Chinese students and at 3:30ish the work on the personal project begins again! I'm having some serious issues with sewing...I think I may make some water colors of the clothes instead.
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