So far, today has been a really good day. Of course, it's not even 11:00 in the morning yet, but the sky is blue, the sun is shining, and the 8:00 class that I didn't prepare for (because I was making pancakes! more on the pancakes later...) was cancelled, because the teacher's wife went into labor. I mean, how many times do you show up for class completely unprepared only to find out that there is no class? Today is a good day.
After finding out that there was no class, I decided to use my extra two hours of freedom to go pay my mobile phone bill. In China, at the beginning of every month, you get a couple of text messages telling you what your balance is. Then you get the text message telling you to pay your balance sooner rather than later. THEN you get the text message telling you that you can no longer send anything, or make outgoing calls, and if you don't pay your balance by the next day, you won't be able to receive anything, either. This is the point at which you start walking around your neighborhood in search of China Mobile branches. The university office was closed due to the May 1st holiday (Chinese businesses and universities celebrate International Labor Day by taking a week off from work) - I wasn't too upset, though, because it spared me from having to deal with the horrible women who work in that office. I ventured off campus, and found another China Mobile branch which I remembered having driven by on the way back from the clothing market yesterday (more on the clothing market later). After throwing some elbows to keep people from cutting in front of me in line (line-cutting in China is a well-practiced sport...) I got to the counter, told the woman my phone number, paid my bill in cash, and got my phone turned back on immediately. Some things in China don't work at all, and some things work oddly well. Cell phones are one of the latter.
Yesterday afternoon I went with my roommate and two of my friends to a clothing market that isn't so much a clothing market as a cloth-and-tailoring market - you go and pick out the bolt of cloth that you like, pick out a clothing design, get measured by a tailor, and then are told to come back a week later to get fitted. One of my friends ordered a qipao, which is a traditional Chinese dress - I decided to go for a jacket, which I thought I would get a bit more use out of - but still, probably mostly at office Christmas parties. It's not the sort of thing you can just wear out on the street. The market was just incredible, though - everything from pure silk to fake fur, glitter, pleather, cotton, wool Burberry patterns... just, anything you could ever want is all there. After getting measured for the qipao and jacket, my friends and I continued looking around, and stumbled on a woman selling fleece and silky pajama material - we all wound up getting blue "funky monkey" print pajama pants - that is, a print of little monkeys eating bananas with the words "funky monkey" interspersed at random intervals. I am very psyched to be getting tailored "funky monkey" pajama pants!
It's sort of a tradition at CET that every Wednesday evening a student hosts a study break. Last night I decided to try and make chocolate chip pancakes for everyone. I had chocolate chips and maple syrup from home, and two boxes of pancake mix that I had bought at the local Carrefour (the French answer to Wal-Mart which is currently expanding rapidly in China). It wound up going really, really well, despite a minor/major crisis at the beginning: a self-professed "pancake expert" who was brought in as a batter-mixing consultant at the beginning wound up adding about two gallons of water to the mix, resulting not so much in batter as in soup... fortunately, the crisis was easily resolved, as the time of the study break was pushed back an hour, he raced off to Carrefour to buy more mix, and I used the extra time to go to the supermarket for beer. I tend to have a beer in the kitchen while I'm making dinner, and it was great to be able to hold a beer in one hand while flipping pancakes with the other - though I had to assure the Chinese roommates that this is not typical American behavior - pancakes are served as a breakfast food, and Americans don't drink beer for breakfast (most of us, anyways...) After the batter crisis was resolved, it was just really fun - there were about 20 people in the kitchen at one point, it smelled like pancakes, which made me really homesick, and I got to watch the Chinese roommates learn how to flip pancakes for the first time - they thought it was great fun, and the pancakes tasted really good, too, which was even better. We had enough batter to make 66 pancakes (according to the box), and there were only five left at the end - a mark of a successful evening! I had a leftover one this morning - still good, though pancakes aren't one of those things which tend to improve with age.
I am now off to the coffee shop to prepare for class this afternoon - any day which features real coffee is also, by definition, a very good day! if only the weather will just keep staying this warm!
