There are a lot of people in China

My first official day in Beijing was mostly spent inside watching movies. I am incredibly tired right now, so this will be a fairly short entry. I wish I had some pictures to show you, but alas I do not. Yet. I woke up at 7:30 today, showered, and ate breakfast with my roommate, Di. We went to a street vendor around the corner from the dormitories and grabbed breakfast. I ate a sort of tofu soup, which was nice but I kind of wish that the food hadn't been hot because it was already so hot outside.

Being a vegetarian here is going to be totally fine. I eat most of my meals with a native speaker anyhow, so they usually order for me. It's funny though, people here assume that I don't know how to use chopsticks. Which I do... but I guess they think Americans don't eat with chopsticks? haha. 

After breakfast we had a sort of briefing and introduction to the course. We have our own special isolated classroom on the sixth floor of the buildings where our dormitories are. The first film we saw was I Wish I Knew by Jia Zhang-Ke, who also directed The World, which I saw in my contemporary cinema class Spring term. I Wish I Knew was a sort of oral history of modern Shanghai. I really enjoyed that film. Then we had a two hour lecture/discussion about the film, comparing it to the modern Chinese blockbuster After Shock. 

Then we had lunch, which was fun. It was my first meal with everyone and I got to know a lot of people better. All of the people on the program except for me speak some sort of Chinese, but everyone has been super kind about the language barrier. People always translate for me and I can always ask someone for help (like when the waitresses didn't understand that I wanted to buy a bottle of water. A phrase that would probably be useful for me to learn at some point). Chinese is really hard. Did you know that? I think you did.

We had a short break and some technical difficulties and then watched Wong Kar-wai's 2046, which was weird but in a good way. Then twelve or so of us (there's about 25 on the program) went out to a really delicious dinner at a fancy restaurant where they presented all of the dishes with an accompanying rhyme describing the auspicious things that would happen if we ate them. In Chinese, of course. Apparently they were all pretty hokey but I couldn't understand so I just laughed when everyone else did. 

Now I'm back in my dorm and my roommate has gone home to her parent's house for the night so I have the room to myself. The internet here is really slow so and it's like 7:30 in Seattle and I don't have access to facebook so I'm probably just going to watch some Family Guy on my iTunes and call it a night. I am still VERY jetlagged, and could use a few beers.