1st day of school!

Lee, in response to your comment, there are a bunch of crazy foods, and I will get to that later in the post.

Yesterday morning we started out with breakfast at the hotel, this morning I will take some pictures of that and post tomorrow.

After breakfast we headed off to school. The campus is really nice and just a short walk from the hotel. Here are some pictures of the campus. This is me at the gate of the campus with my friend Ben and a picture of the whole group from UNC. Notice the cool Chinese letters on top of the archway. I am still trying to understand what some of the symbols mean, but somehow I cannot figure any of it out. They gave us this book that has some useful Chinese phrases in it, but since it is a tonal language and I have a serious southern accent, I think it will only be helpful if I just carry it around with me and point at the phrase I need. I have learned a couple of phrases: Nehow is hello and shi shi is thank you...they are very helpful. I said them yesterday morning to one of the hotel employees and he was super excited.
The campus is really gorgeous and there are some really cool lakes and canals. I did not get any pictures of it, but there were even some men fishing out of the lake. Here is the lake and then a picture of me and the canal, and JB and me in front of the canal.

Everybody rides bikes here. We have thought about renting bikes and still might do it, but if you do you are taking your life into your own hands. Traffic is crazy here, there seem to be no rules and people do not pay attention to the stoplights at all. My brother Denton would probably say that it is like a whole country full of Anna's! Last night on the way home I thought our cab driver was going to kill a biker, and on the way to the restaurant a chinese man got out of his truck at the stoplight, ran around it, and got back in the driver's seat. My friend Katy said, "this is just too perfect for words, a real life Chinese fire drill!." Look at all the bikes parked outside of the school building:
Check out the gorgeous flowers outside of the entrance to the garden, there are a lot of petunias, begonia, daffodils, and what mom would call hummingbird plants:

Oh yeah, there are some students from Purdue here too. This is a picture of a couple of them being goofy with the statue:
So we are walking around the campus, and it is very picturesque and beautiful. Lots of very classic Chinese architecture and design as you have seen from the pictures. Then we round a corner and see these buildings:
and we were like....Wow, there is the evidence of communism!

and this was the start of our first true food adventure......We actually ate lunch at a cafeteria in one of these buildings. It was like eating lunch at the Chinese equivalent of the cafeteria on South Campus at Chapel Hill when I was in undergrad, the name of it escapes me right now.

There was a giant pan of tofu:
Fish heads, which the meat was quite delicious once you got past the fact that it was a fishhead:
Some quite delicious dumpligs from a dumpling station:

And just to make me feel truly at home....Pigs Feet! (I abstained from this menu choice)

There were also lots of other options. I had some rice (surprise, surprise, rice in China!) and some sort of chicken...at least I think it was chicken!

Here is some of our group eating at lunch:
All in all it was a good first day in China, we had lots of interesting adventures and I felt very immersed in the culture!