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Since my last post I've had two 1 on 1 sessions with two different Chinese teachers. We have these sessions every day and they last for 50 minutes. These are really intense. There is no where to hide and no way to pass a question on to another student. Every time the teacher asks you a question, you have to figure out what it means and respond. That means a lot of the time the teacher repeats or rephrases the same question sometimes three or four times. It can be embarrassing to ask the teacher what he is saying but the teachers are, as usual, very nice about it, as it is expected that we are going to have trouble, especially at the beginning. Compared to the teachers, I feel like I am talking at a painfully slow rate. Often I have to stop mid-sentence, collect myself, and start over. But even looking back at my session today compared with my session yesterday I can notice improvement. My ears are slowly becoming accustomed to hearing Chinese all the time, so I can pick up on phrases or words that I know much faster. With just two days of school, my vocabulary has grown tremendously. These 1 on 1 sessions really pressure me to engage completely in Chinese for a full 50 minutes. They may be the most valuable part of the curriculum.

Today I ate my first of what I expect to be many weird things on this trip. My friends and I went to a small restaurant in Wudaokou that serves each person a bowl of broth and noodles with an assortment of things to put in the soup and to eat on the side. This assortment consisted of many strips of meat that I can not identify, but it also included a plate of fried honeybees. I know they were bees and not some other insect because they had their wings and stripes and everything else that a bee has. They were also about an inch long each, and fully intact. They are very crunchy and mostly tasteless, but the worst is that you have to chew them for longer than you wish you did, and after you swallow you still have honeybee in your teeth. One of my friends really took a liking to them, but I was content with just one. I give eating honeybees 2 dumplings (out of 5 obviously).

MS