COOOOOLD

It's super cold here.  I know I shouldn't be complaining too much considering some of my friends are in Harbin, China on the border with Russia, but I can't help it.  I haven't been properly warm in days.  Our dorm rooms have "heaters," but really, they don't do that great of a job.  The classrooms don't use heaters either.  And outside surely isn't warm, so I'm forced to constantly suffer through this chilly weather.

I think it might not be so bad if it wasn't for the rain.  Usually, I really love cold weather (barring that one trip to Chicago where the temperatures were something like -13).  It's brisk and really wakes you up in the morning, but here, the cold is always accompanied by the rain which just seems to seep in everywhere.

Besides the weather, I had a good weekend.  Decided to stay and explore the city instead of heading to Shanghai, which was nice.  On Friday night, a bunch of us went to Maya Bar for food and drink specials.  They served MEXICAN FOOD!!!  I had chicken burritos with real white meat...none of this biting into your KFC sandwhich only to find a bone and some darm sinew. As the night dragged on, we saw a white man pull up in a van outside the window.  He unloaded a grill and proceeded to cook these massive hamburgers.  Although we'd already eaten, none of us could pass up a hamburger.  So we ate them.  Turns out we met a ton of American, German, English, Australian, French expats that night.  They were all really cool (and really old), so it was nice to be able to ask them questions that you can't exactly ask another Chinese person.

Classes are still going well.  I took a few pictures this weekend when we headed out into the city, but most of them turned out like crap because of the weird and awkward weather.  West Lake was constantly covered in this dense fog/misty rain making it near impossible to take a picture that didn't look like I was gazing across the River Styx in Hades.  Anyway, when the weather lets up, I'll have some nice pictures to put up.