I never have ice-cream but I’m eating Peters Vanilla ice-cream with caramel sauce. Omg, omnom ^3^ I might have toast in a minute. My sister is having some and it smells fucking good e.e

A quick apology for not posting in a while. Ever since classes started up, I’m exhausted by the end of the day. It’s not so much the volume of work we have as just the mental drain of keeping up and processing a new language 24/7. So I’m definitely not going to be able to keep up a daily posting schedule, but I can shoot for every 2-3 days. Right now I have a backlog of posts I’m in the middle of writing, but I don’t really feel like finishing those right now. So, here’s an incomplete list of things about China that have either intrigued me or almost killed me.

First! Chinese people Can. Not. Drive. That’s one stereotype that I wish wasn’t true - the roads here are absolute mayhem. There is absolutely no concept of staying in your lane, using turn signals, a speed limit, or even stopping for pedestrians in front of you. That last one is actually really dangerous – in China drivers have the right of way, always. So if you get hit, you are forced to pay for the damage to their car, plus all that damage done to yourself, always. So cars (or the giant city busses) never stop to let someone cross the street, they don’t even stop to let someone finish crossing the street – I see a lot of people standing in between lanes in the middle of heavy traffic, like the middle of the road is some waypoint they can just rest at until an empty space comes along. It’s your responsibility to move out of their way. The last taxi ride I took the driver used the horn more than the brake. Crazy.

Oh, I almost forgot that the sidewalk can double as an extra lane of traffic. Well not traffic, but if someone needs to get around something there is absolutely no hesitation to hop the curb and drive on the sidewalk. Sometimes they park there, and it looks like this.

Second, I’ve actually gotten a lot less attention for my red hair than I expected to. There’s even another redhead guy living in the same building as me! (I think I might have to kill him.) I had heard that it would be normal for people to come up really close to look at it or take pictures on the street, but I haven’t noticed any of that. The most I’ve had is some people looking and a handful of turning heads, but nothing intrusive and not that much overall. Kind of nice actually. Perhaps because Beijing is a pretty international city, they’ve seen it all before. But I am getting a kick out of playing the token white guy (as opposed to token ginger) on the trip, I’m the only one in our USC group and usually the only one when we’re out and around. I haven’t been comfortable enough walking around to play it up a bit and start talking to random people, but I think I may have to start.

Third, everything is super cheap here. I can get 20 dumplings for $1.40, a taxi ride across town for $5, and even a nice restraint meal runs less than $3/person. It’s amazing! China artificially undervalues it’s currency to make its goods cheaper on the global market, which hurts American business’s ability to compete but also makes China an awesome place to be a foreigner. The best (worst?) are the ice cream bars (bīngqílín), which I can get on the ground floor of the dorm for … wait for it … 30¢. It’s too easy. I can’t stop. Those ice creams are going to be the death of me.

And lastly, the toilets don’t have seats. As in, these things are little porcelain holes in the ground that you have to stand over, and squat. It’s not that bad for the first little bit, there’s a pleasant cool breeze in places you aren’t usually lucky enough to get a cool breeze. But then the minutes wear on and you realize several things.

1. About two minutes in comes the realization that while the Chinese have been doing this since birth and have no doubt perfected the art of the squat toilet, we Americans have never had to squat for anything, and these muscles do not like us after decades of disuse. In fact, they would like nothing more than to crumple in exhaustion. 
2. Not having toilet paper is a game changer. At this point, you better have brought wetwipes because the only alternative are the socks on your feet and the money in your wallet. And while wiping your ass with dolla dolla bills has a certain street cred appeal, the reality of the situation is that these are grimy, crinkled, relatively rigid pieces of valuable currency.
3. Right now, you are utterly vulnerable. Bare legs, bare butt, and the fact that you are balancing three inches over a pot of putrid stew in a position so unstable that any touch to your knees would mean an imminent splashdown.

It’s a constant battle with yourself in which there is one way to win, and many, many ways to lose.