Booor-ring

Today was my first full day of work since I've been here, and oh. my. god! The internet is unbelievably slow! Right now I'm doing a tedious literature search, which even on a good day would involve hours of combing through pdf files online. But today was just ridiculous. I mean, they warned me that foreign pages would load a bit slower than Chinese pages, but seriously? At this rate, there could totally be a Chinese official sitting in some room leisurely perusing each document I attempt to access. I'd say I spent an average of 5-10 minutes per document. And that's just to figure out if it's worth downloading! And I have no choice but just to sit there, twitching in frustration as I wait for each page to load.

Given that this was how I spent my day, I was thrilled when one of the teachers in the office asked me to help his friend fill out an immigration form for Canada. Human interaction! Translation! No computer! And the timing was perfect, we finished with the form just in time for me to leave for my first kung fu class. But this guy and his friend were so grateful for my assistance that they insisted on taking me out for dinner, even though I had told them earlier that I had something at 5. So I missed my first class and was all disappointed. But dinner mostly made up for it. Look at this food!



So many colors! So tasty! The food in the dining hall is fine, but it all looks like brown slop compared to this stuff. It was nice to go out to a real restaurant for a change.

By the way, another featured dish at dinner tonight was this one:

See those soft, pine cone shaped things? Those are pig kidneys.