六月二十八到三十号，星期四到六

It was raining pretty hard outside on Thursday, so I brought my red raincoat. At least, the temperature was nice and cool. I biked in the rain all the way to class. I had to write on the blackboard today for a little word quiz. I got most of them, but there were some small errors that made a big difference. During the first 5 minutes of speaking class, I had to present a speech/report type thing. I spoke about the history of Yuanmingyuan, which my mom helped me research (since a lot of it’s history is written in Chinese). I told the class about how a child insulted Chris because he thought that the Americans helped destroy Yuanmingyuan. Too bad he was off by 40 years. The Americans, along with seven other countries, came in to China in 1900, while Yuanmingyuan was destroyed in 1861.

I ate at a different canteen with Chris. We accidentally ordered too much, so we couldn’t finish all of it. I was pretty stuffed. Chris forgot to bring his bike today, so I offered to bike him over to 五道口, but unfortunately, the bike was a bit too unstable (plus he was a little too nervous). I checked my email and filled in some of my blog. After watching Fēnghérìlì (a TV drama series my mother and grandma are currently watching) I finished up my homework. Kevin also gave us a call. He spoke with mom for a long time first then spoke with me for a bit. He said I need to learn 40 characters a day to be able to read a newspaper at the end of 6 weeks. That’s going to be very difficult.

~ end of entry, 8:11am, June 29th, Line 13 subway

It rained again on Friday. 今天是雨天。我骑自行车到留学生教室楼。骑了差不多十三分钟从五道口。我来到教室的时候看见我的老师在教室门的外面等。我问她，门儿是不是锁的. After a few moments she came back with a key and opened to the door. We started at 8:50am. It wasn’t too tiring today, because we have short classes on Fridays.

I ate lunch with Fumi, Jen, Myles, Chris, and David. This time, I got noodle soup. It was very good – much better than a lot of the other things they were serving (I guess that’s why there was a long line). I was thinking of heading straight home after lunch, but I went back to the hotel with them because Jen mentioned they might play soccer. We ended up convening in Fumi and David’s room, but instead of getting ready to play soccer – we watched soccer. Then everyone fell asleep. Around 3pm or so, Mom called, and I decided to go back home. Not long after I got back, Mom, Dayi, and Sanyi returned from a coffee outing at 东四. It was Dayi’s seventieth birthday today, so they had gone out for lunch.

Tomorrow, I have to wake up early to get to the hotel at 7:20am for the class trip to the Great Wall at Badaling.

~ end of entry, 10:06pm, June 30th, Living room table

Saturday morning, I woke up around 4am and went back to sleep until 5:30am. I left the house at 5:45am and managed to get to the hotel by 6:50am. The breakfast at the hotel didn’t start until 7am so I just waited in the lobby until then. When breakfast opened, I ate with everyone else. I had some tiny zongzi, soy milk, ludan, rice porridge, watermelon, and xianyadan. It wasn’t bad. We met Chen Xi at the lobby around 7:30am and hopped on a van to Badaling. We transferred to Bus #920 to the cable car area. I went to the restroom while our group waited in line to board the gondola. The bathroom was really nasty – might as well have went outside.

Once we got to the top of the Great Wall, we walked our way down, taking pictures along the way. It was a very nice sunny day and when it got too hot, we could always stick our heads out the crenelations to catch a cool mountain breeze. It’s too bad there were so many people. I would’ve liked it much better without the crowd. We had lunch after climbing all the way down. We didn’t risk going to one of the restaurants for fear of them charging us too much money. Instead, we settled for KFC which served pretty high quality stuff. I had a wrap with chicken, lettuce, tomato, and some chili type sauce. I went outside after finishing the wrap and snacked on some of the things my mom packed for me in the morning.

Our next stop was the Ming Tombs. It was very hot by now and everyone was tired. Outside of the shaded underground area, the actual Ming Tomb exhibit wasn’t worth 65 RMB per person. We got back to the hotel around 3:30pm and I biked back to 五道口 and quickly as I could in the scorching sun. I managed to make it back home around 5pm.

~ end of entry, 9:07am, July 1st, 姥姥’s table