Typhoon Rammasun

As many of you all know, Typhoon Rammasun has just passed the coast of China. Zhuhai lay on the southern coast of China. There was a lot of rain here in the past couple of days. Everything has been well though. I went to the mall yesterday in the pooring rain and even played my outdoor basketball games today. We won 2 games and lost 2 games in the tournament today so we will play again soon to hopefully advance. Jeremy took pictures of me playing 篮球.

I have a midterm (my first test) on Tuesday so I have been studying rather hard for that. Jeremy has been helping me with daily conversation. This is just an update post to tell everyone that all is well in Zhuhai and I am having a great time. 再见！

Guangzhou

A few days ago, the students in my program took an hour and a half bus trip to Guangzhou, the 6th most populated city in the world, and the sister city of Richmond, VA. Guangzhou is the capital of the Guangdong Province in China. We visited the Museum of the Chen family, a prominent family in Chinese history. Chen Lóng (Jackie Chan) is a direct member to this ancient family. We also visited a temple, the South China Botantical Garden, and Beijing Lù. I will only touch on Beijing Lù but I have pictures of the botanical garden and the museum as well. 

路 (lù) literally means road. Beijing Lù is a huge outdoor shopping mall that is full of vendors and many people on a stretch for blocks and blocks on this road and other adjacent roads. There are 17 million people in metro area of Guangzhou and that number plus tourists is frightening to see in most famous shopping center in all of Guangdong Province. My most interesting experience thus far came on this one street. The small division of the group I was with had one goal and one goal only, to buy some good quality fake watches. A man walked up to us and told us he had a shop that had great watches and other things. We figured that this would be a fun experience because this is something they strictly told us not to do. We went through a dark alley and up three flights of stairs; we walked another half of a block through more than a dozen stray cats and drying clothes in the bowels of an outdoor apartment complex. The man takes us into a room and hits the lights. There is everything from fake LV bags to fake Hermes belts and ties, but most importantly, the shop contains and endless supply of "namebrand" watches from Hublot to Rolex to Timex. The man out of the three of us, we decide to bargain for four watches (one guy got two). The first offer was 4500 yuan which is equivolent to about $725 US dollars. One, we did not have that much with us combined; 2, we weren't about to pay that much money for some knock-off watches. The next offer was 3400 yuan. Still not good enough. Then they dropped all the way to 2200 yuan which is about $354 and about $90 per watch. This was still not good enough. I told them that we would pay 800 yuan for all four and then they said no way. We smoothly proceeded to the door and aggressively unlocked it. They had a counter offer of 1400 yuan but that was still way too high. I let them know that we were serious and I dropped the proce to 700 yuan because I found a small scratch on one of the guys' watches. One of the men selling the watches told me in Chineae that he could not go that low because he has a family and a little boy to feed. I then typed in 900 yuan and we settled on that number. That is $145 and $36 per watch which is a pretty great deal. We paid the man and swiftly made our way out of the room and the live-lacking complex. We boasted about our watches for the rest of the night as we knew we had mastered the skill of Chinese street bargaining.

It Takes a Village

The week is finally over and it ended on a great note. Tonight I was out with some friends at Pizza Hut, which is extremely nice Italian dinning in China and other countries outside of the US. My friends and I demanded that we go to Pizza Hut and indulge ourselves in an American meal on our country's independence day.  The pizza was actually really good even though I cursed out the manager in chinese for not serving cheese pizza, the simplist of all pizzas. You essentially have to make cheese pizza before you make any other type of pizza. It really ticked me off. But besides that we had a great time. We sang the national anthem blatantly loud at the end of our meal with my host brother Jeremy. It was an amazing experience, but not near as cool as the village we visited yesterday. 

Usually we have afternoon classes from 2-5, but yesterday we went on an excursion to a village after lunch. It was very interesting. The bus dropped us off at a point where the road came to an end and we hiked about 30 minutes to the center of the village. The village was full of museums and ancient artifacts that symbolized the majesty and age of China. I was very fortunate to see this side of China and not just the big cities like Guangzhou, Zhuhai, and Hong Kong. The poeplw in this village were very nice and we had tea with the village people. They taught us how to make tea and how to drink it properly in a social environment. I made black tea (héise chá) and flower tea. The black tea was really good surprisingly. The flour tea was not so good. I can be seen making and testing tea in some of the pictures. Tomorrow morning I will go litchi picking with my host family and one of my friend's host families. I am looking forward to it. Check out the many pics. In the mean time, zàijiàn!