Progress

Today was a pretty good day so far. My coworker Xiaofeng (who lives in a neighboring building about 50m away) helped me get my phone set up and showed me around the area that I'm living in.

We met up around 9:30 (AM) and I hadn't eaten, so she showed me a nearby restaurant and I got some soup and baozi. Both really hit the spot. I think I'm coming down with a bit of a cold, and this morning my throat was sore, so the soup really helped. It had tiny shrimp-type creatures floating in it. They were really pretty tiny, maybe 1.5cm in length, and their eyes looked like little poppy seeds. I wasn't sure if they were actually meant to be eaten, so I left them and went mainly for the broth and dumplings in the soup. I'm pretty sure that it was won ton soup, but the name in Chinese sounds way more intense than in English.

Anyway after breakfast we went looking for a bike, but they were too expensive. The cheapest ones were about 350 RMB and they were pretty basic. Xiaofeng has a pretty good bike (it has gears, and knobbly tires, but no shock absorbers) and she said hers cost 190, so I'm determined to find a better deal. That is a quest for another day however.

After the bicycle shop we went to go get my cellphone from the repair place where it was being unlocked (so I could use a Chinese SIM/service provider). When we got there they said to come back at 1, so we went back to the neighborhood and went to the grocery store where I obtained essential items such as: milk, sugar, and a teaspoon. Now I can happily consume coffee in my apartment. SUCCESS. Xiaofeng went home because she had something to do, so I went back to my place and took a nap.

We met up again and picked up the phone, then got a new SIM card and put some money on the phone, which took a little longer than I expected but worked out fine in the end. Oh that reminds me, I took the bus! This also resulted in me learning some numbers. We took bus 112 which is yao yao er. There are a lot of buses here. I think they're numbered all the way up to the 900s. There are small sketchy looking ones that are just a bit bigger than a large van, fairly normal sized ones that seem to come in both diesel and electric varieties, as well as large articulated diesel ones. The yao yao er is a normal sized electric bus. The bus costs 1 RMB to ride if you pay cash, but if you buy a card it's 0.4 RMB, so I got one of those on the way to the phone place.

Trying to adapt to living here has so far been an excellent exercise in learning just how much I took for granted about life before. I've never been so satisfied to obtain breakfast in my entire life.

Anyway, that was today's adventure, and a good adventure it was.

Tomorrow I think I will go out and take some pictures of the area. Up until now I've been either too busy or too tired to think of photography, but I have no plans for tomorrow, so I think some picture taking is in order.

Now I think I will take a nap, and then go back to the grocery store and obtain some non-coffee-related foodstuffs for my apartment so that I can feed myself without going out every single time.

NAP TIME