Diving in Headfirst
Today was the first day of class. Yesterday we took our language pledge (\'i pledge not to speak any language other than mandarin...\'), met our teachers, got our first homework and met our roommates.

My roommate\'s name is Yao2 Rui4. He is from the province south of here, near Dalian, and he studies something having to do with electrical engineering, I haven\'t figured it out exactly yet. But he\'s really nice and this evening I got to meet a few of his friends, we all hung out in our room and chatted for a while about music, movies, etc. My new word of the day (one of many, but if I had to pick one,) is dao4 ban3, which literally means pirated, as in DVDs. It feels so good to just sit around and chat in Chinese, even if more than half of the \'chatting\' is them trying to explain to me what they mean, but still, very linghou (free, smooth).

Today we started class. I have 4 classes, each fairly distinct, unlike last summer\'s fully coordinated and integrated program. First was Business Chinese, learning long lists of shengci (vocab) like \'efficiency\', \'economic system\', \'financial loss\' and \'to establish a unified system with special characteristics\'. My other class is a literature class where we read various short stories written in modern China (for Chinese readers, not foreign students), which looks like it will be my hardest class by a bit. We also have one-on-two class, which is mostly pronounciation, with which I defiinitely have a few distinct problems. Probably the one I\'m most excited about and nervous about is the one-on-one class, or the research class. I met my professor already, and she seems very cool, and her specialty is very close to the research topic I chose. I will be looking at Chinese perceptions of westernization, how they feel the west is encroaching on (or brightening) their lives here in a fairly out-of-the-way city. She studies how technology affects society, so I\'m also very curious to hear more about her work.

Last night we went out to a restaraunt with our new roommates. There were about 12 of us sitting around a big table with a big lazy susan in the middle. This restaraunt\'s specialty is a kind of northeastern dish that consists of either ribs or leg bones of pig stacked in a heaping pile on a plate, with bits of meat hanging off them. They give you a plastic glove with your chopsticks and you just grab a big hunk. It feels very neanderthal, especially to someone who\'s three years of vegetarianism is on a brief two month haitus, but I\'d be lying if I said it didn\'t taste good. Then we started toasting each other as if we were old Chinese businessmen, trying to make the people around us drink more and more by doing a ganbei (literally, dry/empty your cup) with them. I didn\'t drink that much, but when I came home and started doing my homewwork I lasted about 20 minutes and then fell right asleep at 10:00 or so. This morning I had to reassure my roommate that this is not my xiguan (habit), that I really stay up later and he shouldn\'t worry that he\'s stuck with a nerdy, early-to-bed American. But the combination of jumping right into the language pledge, meeting the roommate, running for over an hour then playing an hour of soccer, trying to homework for the first time in a month and not quite being adjusted to the time zone meant I was out like a light for the next ten hours. So it goes.