Whew.

It's Friday afternoon in Beijing. The first week of classes here at CNU are finally over. That was one of the longest academic weeks I've ever been a part of. I think I can safely say that it was a successful one though. This morning was the first weekly test in my Chinese class. The test consisted of a written portion that tested our memory of new vocabulary and also tested our memory of newly learned sentence structure. The second part of the test consisted of an oral examination. Everyone in the class was assigned a 7 minute period throughout the morning to come into the class room and hand in a written paragraph written about the lessons of the week, and then to begin speaking using the new vocabulary and sentence structures for 5 minutes straight. Needless to say, I made it to about 3 minutes and then got the deer in the headlights look. Thankfully, my teacher began asking me questions in Chinese using the sentence structures that I hadn't used yet, and I was actually able to answer her questions. But overall, I think that I did pretty well. We also had a daily quiz every day this week, which covered about 30 new characters a night and 6 new sentence structures. Studying for those normally takes up all of my evenings all week. Unfortunately, I also have two other classes. So, up to this point, those classes have received very little attention, but don't worry, I'll get into the swing of things soon.
On a lighter note, after everyone had finished their tests, a big group of us foreigners headed down to our favorite little alley that sells scallion pancakes and other baked goodies and had a tasty lunch. It was a really beautiful Friday afternoon, so I took a few pictures. We could actually see the large hills behind the city, which you can see in one of the pictures that I posted today. We then wondered around for a little while, and then the consensus was that a nap was in order. Muh woke me up at about 5:30. Tonight, across town there are acrobats performing, and there was a sign up sheet in the laundry room—a sheet that I failed to sign. So, I'm here all by myself until later this evening. Then hopefully I'll be heading out for a night on the town in Beijing, which promises to be very interesting! I'll definitely update you all on the night scene in Beijing sometime this weekend. Until then, Zai Jian.