ok... now back to China! I just got back from dinner at Sizzler, which was really similar to Ponderosa (do they still have those?) on the East Coast. it was awesome, in kind of an odd way. I mean, I ordered a hamburger and a beer, which both tasted just like home, except that I wasn't at home, I was in Beijing. Everything was the same, except that the Pepsi can in front of me was written in Chinese. It was a very odd feeling. There was country music playing on the stereo system, and everything at the salad bar was totally American - enough so that my roommate had to ask me what everything was, and I felt daring enough to do something that I've been warned many times I should never, ever do in China, which is eat lettuce and uncooked vegetables... oddly enough, I think the best part of the evening was eating salad, because I usually eat salad pretty often, and I haven't been able to at all since I've been here.
Maybe the best part about the restaurant was the fact that, apart from the three guys who were there when we arrived and left shortly thereafter, everyone else in the restaurant was Chinese. Sizzler, being a Western restaurant, is horribly expensive by Chinese standards. The steak was 160 yuan - $20 - ten times as much as an entire dinner costs normally. I was worried before we arrived that it would be full of Americans, but it wasn't at all. You still get this uneasy feeling of the contrast between rich and poor, though - but isn't that how society has always worked? It seems that here, I keep losing track of what is normal.
My friend Cindy bought a cake, and in China, it is traditional that the person whose birthday it is gets to wear a paper crown. We took lots and lots of pictures, and hopefully sometime this weekend I will be able to put some of them online. I really, really liked my crown, and I'm actually still wearing it now (I wore it outside on the street in front of the restaurant while we were waiting for a cab - I figured people were going to stare at me anyways - they might as well stare at me because I'm wearing a crown....!)
So, that is the story of my birthday. It was a really fun day! I'm now off to write a 200 character reaction to a poem we read, which was actually due this morning, but oh well. I am now busy thinking about what I should write, other than "my reaction to this poem was that I did NOT want to write a reaction to it..." - the creativity of which will probably not be appreciated, besides which, I don't know how to write that in Chinese. ANYWAY, I am going to stop typing now. good night!
