Heidelberg China Trip 2011

Well, today we were supposed to go shopping with Jim and Alexa’s student Vicki at 10:30 AM.

Due to some issues at home and the late night last night, I only had slept like 2 or 3 hours so I felt awful. I decided to forgo the experience and just continue to sleep. I’m glad I did, as I woke up at about 1:30 PM after falling asleep at 10 AM. So this post is naturally going to be pretty short and not so interesting.

Everyone got back at 2 PM and we all hung out in Lisa and Mary’s room for a while. Jim told each of us to pick out one of his paintings that he would give us…which is WAY too generous. So now we are trying to think of a gift to make or give him to say thank you. Nothing will ever compare, but at least we are going to try to do something.

After Lisa had to go to Maggie’s house, the previous Chinese professor at Heidelberg, Mary and I decided to go to Culture Street.

I believe that was the fifth or sixth time we had been there. We definitely had our lists ready for who to shop for, but we still wanted to look and see if things jogged our mind for someone we were struggling to buy a gift for. Basically, Mary and I bought a lot of things that weren’t on our list that we liked, which was inevitable.

We went to a strip of shops we hadn’t been to before and a man who owned a shop started talking to us in English. He was nice and he wasn’t pushy, so we decided to take a look in his shop. He asked us what country we were from and he asked if we knew any Chinese. He also assumed we were just on vacation or something because he said “oh are you flying back in a week?” We explained to him how we had been teaching English for the past three weeks and were going back, and he was really impressed. When I asked what one of the items he was selling was, he didn’t know the english word for the term, but he did the motion for applying lipstick.

So then he asked if we could teach him how to say and spell the word lipstick and we did so gladly. As we were leaving, he gave us each a pair of chopsticks “for luck.” 

We walked around and picked up a ton of other things. I had a lot of fun bargaining today and got the prices down a lot. After three hours at Culture Street, Mary and I headed home. Lisa wasn’t back yet, so after hanging out for a little bit, I decided to do some laundry. I had to hand wash some of my clothes and hang them up, which is a lengthy process when you only have a couple things. But I really did need to wash them, so I didn’t really mind.

After laundry, Mary, Alexa, and I decided to walk to this cafe called “Cozy Cafe” that had western food. The owner is actually American I believe, so they had lots of options.

The food was really delicious. I got a strawberry milkshake, a Fanta, and chicken and beef fajitas. Mary got fajitas and a mango milkshake, while Alexa got chili and a baked potato. The waitresses and waiters even knew English which was an interesting change from what were used to. 

So here I am, after dinner, exhausted and ready for our Beijing trip.

I won’t be updating tomorrow night or possibly Monday night because we are taking the bullet train to Beijing and spend a day and a half just wandering and doing who knows what. The whole trip is spontaneous and not planned sooo it’s what we make of it. I’m really excited, but I’m not bringing a laptop so I won’t be able to blog. I’ll be taking tons and tons of pictures, more then probably necessary. So look out for that on Monday or Tuesday night.

This is our official start to our last week in China. I could stay here forever!