what i've learned in 2 and a half months

so i'm copying this from a fellow blogger..

i know more restaurants than the average local because i eat out every meal.
i know where to buy fake brand names and get ripped off if you don't speak chinese.
i know the fastest way to get a taxi at the china world center by not having to compete with locals who don't know what a 'queue' is.
i know where to find decent japanese food super-cheap to satisfy sushi-cravings and thirsty nights with free flow beer.
i know every line on the subway because i've gone around the whole loop. not fun.
i know where to find cute local girls who will help you practice chinese for free.
i know a not-so-famous restaurant where the cook used to work at beijing hotel.
i know where to find mongolian girls that want to make some 'extra money'.
i know how to order food that no foreigner will want to eat.
i know how to keep a restaurant open till 2am when their closing time is at 1030pm.
i know when hotel chefs start work daily.
i know i'm bored right now.

i hate cheap liquor

goddamn china.

so i'm just recovering from 11 hours of the worst hangover of my life. woke up at 630am for school, still drunk, stomach ache, and dizzy as hell. after wanting to throw up numerous times during the course of the day i think it's finally going away.

and the poison?

chinese 白酒 (baijiu) - which translates into white liquor. a clear liquid that is stupidly strong (56%), and stupidly cheap. for a small bottle of the rank bottle at a restaurant it costs 5yuan which is not even 1$ CAD. anyways it doesn't taste really bad, as i prefer the taste to any other strong liquor straight up. the really awful thing though is it makes the next day a living nightmare probably due to all the impurities.

i promise myself never ever to drink that dirty liquor again. might as well splurge and go for the 100yuan bottles or something more expensive so i won't feel like i'm going to die the next day.

dododo

it seems no matter how drunk or tired i am after a night of heavy drinking, i still manage to make it into the shower before i go to sleep.

i guess i'm a shower nerd.

russians win again

so, another fun half-week thanks to my two russian friends. these two are actually brothers, where the younger one was my classmate from the first level, and the older one is my current classmate.

a little background on them, they're russian but mixed with mongolian so they look like some chinese-mix of some sort.

anyways, they wanted to go for mongolian food on monday which i didn't mind to try since i'm down for trying even the gross things. anyways they suggest the mongolian embassy since there's a little cafe there that they really like.

so we get there and i let them order. first thing to come is tea.

tea? how can that be a story?

mongolian milk tea.

never heard of it? well basically it's hot water, fat, and salt. grrrrrrrrrrrrrreat.

too bad it tastes as bad as it sounds. but me being me, drank it all with a happy smile. the other food was pretty good. something like a xiaolongbaozi but with sheep meat and spices that made it just taste like a greasy meatball in baozi skin. yum.

and yes the other funny thing the russians did. well, the younger russian is 17, a big tall guy, always smiling, but dumb as bricks. his brother is the opposite - smaller guy, older, looks mean as hell, but is a lot smarter.

anyways, younger brother and i were sitting around today killing time when he suddenly says out of nowhere:

"you know our german friend? i think hes gay. OH SHIT"

which made me laugh like a schoolgirl. then he went on to say how his older brother told him that he thinks the german guy is gay. i agree wholeheartedly which made it even funnier.

omg banned

so china reinstated the blogspot ban, which means i can't check my own blog, nor share it with fellow chinamen/women.

i guess it's no big deal since almost 100% of the people who read this anyways are from canada. but it still sucks knowing that i can't even go and read my own blog when i'm bored, or need to check something.

today was okay. went out with a couple of people i met last week. one is an ugly p, the other one is pretty cute. it's weird though, out of everyone i know, these two are the hardest to understand when they talk. i seem to get the meaning of things when other people talk, but these two use vocabulary i've never heard of, or they have some weird eastern accent confuses me entirely. not really sure but it's a pain in the ass. maybe i'll befriend the yogurt girl at the supermarket tomorrow.

jet lag?????

okay this is weird. i went to bed early at 10pm, and here i am wide-awake at 4am.

feels just like when i go home after a trip abroad and can't have extended periods of sleep due to jetlag and messed up habits.

what to do what to do.

i don't think anything is open outside, and walking around outside at night isn't as calming as it is in canada. actually it sometimes creeps me out by the fellows i meet on the street. one major thing they lack here is good streetlights. sometimes you can be walking in the dark for a long time which makes things seem unsafe. my campus only has a single dim streetlight in the entire area. kind of makes me digress from sitting outside with friends at night.

i guess i could study.................................

nah i'll watch a movie.

uneventful much

weekend uneventful.

my friend had to go back to korea for a few weeks to settle family business, so my life has become quite uneventful recently.

i made a new friend who works at the supermarket across the street part-time on weekends. she is a vitamin salesperson and gives out vitamin samples and harrasses you to buy vitamins.

apparently it was funny to her that all i come to buy is water. sure i have bananas, and a couple little things in the cart, but mainly bottles of water. is it really that funny? i'm not sure why other locals aren't buying mass loads of water. i find it a pain in the ass to keep boiling water when i go through 5+ litres a day. mainly due to the fact that i dislike hot/warm water anyways.

i seem to have always gotten funny stares from people before, although none of them actually came up to laugh at me. they always start off by looking at my cart, then giving me some strange look as i pass by. kind of like 'wtf, why is this person wasting so much money on water?' funny thing is, i buy the cheapest and most cost effective water. when i see other people buying water in smaller quantities than me (of course), they always buy the more expensive brands. sooooo i'm not entirely sure why they give me funny looks since my bottles are sometimes 1/3 the price of theirs. strange.

anyways, vitamin girl thought it was funny that i bought so much water, and also funny that i had green tea in my cart. apparently only girls like green tea???? actually i was looking more for green tea powder so i could throw it in some congee and make some half-ass ochazuke. unfortunately i couldn't find any so i had green tea bags as i figured since it's getting cold here maybe i'll want to drink something hot as i don't know how well central heating works.

though since she found it so amusing, she kept giving me free packets of vitamins, so now i have enough vitamin c to give me a kidney stone. maybe i'll eat it all in one day, get a kidney stone, piss it out, write a novel on how painful pissing a kidney stone out was, and then sell the stone on ebay.

or i could just take them regularly like most people.

i'm korean?

so i think i found out why my korean friend likes me so much.

he isn't friends with any other koreans in beijing because he says that his chinese won't progress if he just keeps talking in korean to other korean people.

but the thing is, he always tells me that i'm just like a korean person by the way i eat and drink.

unlike his chinese friends, he doesn't feel guilty when we go out to a pricier restaurant to eat korean food. if he brings chinese friends or other people, he always has to treat them or feel bad that it's beyond their budget. with me, he doesn't feel guilty since he knows that my budget allows me to spend more than 2 american a day.

when it comes to eating he is continuously amazed by what i eat. he says my heat tolerance is like a korean, meaning that i'm fine drinking spicy kimchi soup or eating hot peppers. also the fact that i am willing to eat almost anything. as seen from the previous post, type of animal doesn't really concern me.

my drinking method is also similar to a korean i guess. maybe he's too used to chinese people around here who either don't drink, or drink a couple bottles and end up vomitting all over the washroom (something i've seen way too many times). i guess he feels happy that my drinking ability is equal or greater to him so that when he's lonely and wants to go drinking, he knows that i'll accompany him glass for glass. also that i'm willing to drink (disgusting) soju, which most people don't like. okay wait, i don't like it either but i'll drink it.

anyways, i think that's the reason he's friends with me. otherwise, our communication is quite limited as he doesn't speak english and i'm forced to use broken chinese to bond with his also not-so-broken chinese to pump out meaning in our conversations. either way, i'm glad to have a friend here.

my first time

so, eventful week? sure, i suppose.

i had my first time eating dog.

yes, man's best 4-legged friend. lassie, goofy, pluto, bruno, rover, scooby-doo, deng~

was it an accident? did i know what i was getting into?

of course. i was out eating with my korean friend at his now-favourite korean restaurant. previous time he wanted to order it but didn't know that i was willing to try it. this time i told him that it was okay so we ordered a dish of it.

initial impression - different.

the meat taste is okay i guess. just different than anything i've ever had before. kind of a pungent smell/taste that is like lamb, but in a different sense. the meat itself though is pretty stringy and chewy. maybe if it was braised in a stew it would have been a lot more tender. we had it on a copper plate with some sauce and vegetables, cooked right in front of us.

... i think.

well when the meat came it was already brown. honestly i hope it was precooked before or something because it didn't really change colour when we cooked it. i thought it would be red like pork/beef/lamb, deng.

after a while of eating it i broke out in a sweat and felt really hot. my friend told me that was normal since eating dog is good for men and warms people up in the winter. something i really didn't want. it made me sweat and feel so hot that when i got home i was itching like mad. my other friend said it probably gave me fleas, or i started growing fur.

anyways, i don't think i'll continue eating it on a normal basis. i bet it's 'yeet hay' or something that makes you really hot. nothing special and it's more expensive than any other type of meat at the restaurant. so unless my friend wants to eat it again (which i highly imagine he will), i won't encourage him to order it again.

drinking, not studying, and playing psp

sounds a little bit like going to university.

wait, i'm still in university. not really. sort of. no, not at all.

anyways, these past few days have been pretty interesting.

saturday i went out with my korean classmate and my japanese classmate and our chinese friend to form the neapolitan of oriental races. anyways we went out to drink at some little restaurant on the street which is best known for its lamb kebobs.

okay, first let me get to the lamb kebobs. i'm not a big fan of lamb, so i might see it in a different view from everyone else. but honestly, after i ate too many, it reminded me of arab people body odour. not nice, i know.

anyways, after eating too many of those to accompany many yanjing beers, before we knew it the place closed and we had to emigrate to a 24 xiaoshi restaurant.

i think after about 7 hours of drinking, we totalled close to 30L of beer and who knows how much food. the grand total of everything came to......................... less than 20 canadian.

i honestly don't know how i can go back to canada and spend more than that on 3 bottles at a club, tips included. either way this was the first time i drank in china and found it pretty interesting. i saw a funny sign on the bathroom wall that said 'xxxxxx anus and intestine hospital ...' which i only thought was funny because they used the word anus instead of something else like colon, or just going by the scientific terminology.

anyways, i had a midterm today and yesterday i didn't study as we had quite an adventure. one of our schoolmate's things got sent to main campus in haidian district. never going there before, she got lost on the bus and then called my friend whom i was with in the afternoon. since we both had too much time, we decided to accompany her to haidian to get her things.

wrong move.

actually, it was kind of fun. it took us 1 hour to get there by subway (which i might add is really shitty here in beijing - one transfer station requires u to walk outside and across a few streets). we get to main campus and have no idea where to go because the woman giving us direction as to where we're supposed to meet her is being very vague. on top of that, she talks fast with many 'er' sounds like the other 12 million people in beijing. after being lost for about an hour we finally find the place. after all that fuss she makes us go to the post office. why she didn't tell us to just go there in the first place, i will never know. so after our long adventure it was about the time when beijing subways/traffic hits the all time max since everyone is going home. so jam packed on a subway for a good hour and a half, we finally make it back home.

instead of going home, we decide to meet up later with our schoolmate again for dinner, so my friend and i kill time around our school area. we meet up pretty late for dinner with our schoolmate again, and one of her japanese friends that just arrived in beijing for vacation. late dinner, sparse drinking, and i'm home at 11 with a midterm at 8. i think i've been in worse situations before so no bother.

procrastinatiorrrr

since i'm in beijing, i might as well change all the 'n' ending sounds with the highly overplayed 'er' sound they use here which makes it so that i can't understand anything they're saying.

'wo deng ni zai dong mengkorrrrrr'
'shenme?'
'dong mengkorrrrr'
'shenme?'
'dong mengkorrrrr'
'shenme?'
'dong mengkorrrrr'
'shenme?'
'dong mengkorrrrr'
'shenme?'
'dong mengkorrrrr'
'shenme?'
'dong mengkorrrrr'


.....

'oh, dong mengkou'

btw, i have my second midterm tomorrow. jia you ~