Ritan Park and Church Hopping

The bubble tea stand to whose bubble tea I have become addicted. The people who work there know me and don't even bother to ask what I want anymore.

Ice skating at Hohai park. I, alas, had no skates, but had fun nonetheless.

A pickup hockey game in progress.

My birthday cake.

My family. From left: me, my sister, my mom, my cousin's girlfriend, my cousin. My dad took the picture.

Ritan park.

View from the middle of Ritan Park.

the classic ping pong tables.

random northface climbing wall in the middle of a park.

bored at a park.

a super cool Xinjiang (Chinese/Musilim ethnic group) style restuarant with banquet style dining.

so, i've been super busy and haven't had a lot of time to write blogs. last week, even though i had tons and tons of free time, i never got around to writing. last week we had speeches, given in chinese, lasting 2 or 3 minutes long. The speeches were awesome because they were during chinese class, so no chinese homework. no chinese homework means that my homework load minus 3 or 4 hours, leaving about 1 hour left, much to my delight.

two weekends ago was a lot of funmy friends and I had a great time at the 'alien market'. i am pretty sure the name is just a really bad translation, but my friends and i came up with our own interpretation. only aliens would tempted to buy most of this stuff. anyway, we left pretty quickly. we wasted some time in a bread store and my friend bought me some cake behind my back for an early birthday. then we went to a park, Ritan Park, and wandered around for a while. in the middle of the park there is a lake, which was frozen over. a couple of intelligent children were trying to break through the ice. not that i ever did that....there was also a random north face climbing wall in the middle of the park for no apparent reason. and to round off the evening, we ate some ethnic chinese/muslim food. yummy.

two friday nights ago, we went to this super cool barbeque restaurant. we got beef tongue and it was very delicious. afterwards, we were still a little hungry so we went to a vegetarian restuarant. half way into our meatless meal, we realized the irony of going from a barbeque to a vegetarian place. it was fun stuff. super cold outside, though. i bought a harry potter scarf, its red and gold and says harry potter on it. and i paid 10 kuai for it. the joys of china...

My birthday in beijing was awesome. The day before, my friends took me out to lunch. The day of, Sophie and I had fun shopping before going home to start our mountain of homework. My family took me out to eat and bought me an awesome cake. Other than that, I just did a lot of homework.

So, last weekend, I spent a lot of time studying for finals, but Julia and I had fun on Sunday morning church hopping. yup, church hopping. we had a list of churches in Beijing and went to a few of them to scope them out. We had a lot of fun looking at the different churches and talking to the people who worked them. All of the masses we found were in Chinese, but thats part of the fun. I think the churches offered masses in other languages, but thats just not as fun. We were very surprised at the number of attendents at the masses who were Chinese, I guess the reason why the mass was in Chinese. One mass we went to only had about 3 or 4 foreigners in attendence, including us, out of about 300 people. Also, there were multiple masses in the day, not to mention many masses during the week.

So, this week is our last week of school before winter break. We have finals today, tomorrow, and friday, and then we are free for 2 weeks. Can't wait.

happy holidays and Merry Christmas to all.
Stephanie