Tea houses and xianqi

Yesterday I went exploring with Jenna. I love exploring, especially with a buddy. Actually I was trying to find Beiguo mall so we could find an English bookstore somewhere in the vicinity of that mall. We walked from our place to downtown which is really two turns so its quite easy. I can't imagine walking downtown from Drake. Everything here is very compact and close to everything else, so it's nice that you don't have to rely on cars. We ended up walking all over the place looking in stores that looked interesting. There was an area of downtown that had maybe 10-20 cell phone stores. They all had people outside badgering passersby to pick out a number on the list. Near this area, we happened upon a bunch of guards or officers who were playing xianqi, chinese chess. Jenna had just taught me how to play it the day before so I was excited to see some "pros" play it. There were about 4 or 5 guys huddled around the board and this game was very intense. They were yelling and throwing pieces down like mad people. One guy was definitely losing and not taking it well, so it was funny to watch them and actually know what's going on in the game.

We moved on and eventually stopped in a tea store. The lady sat us both down and started making tea for us to try. We had green and jasmine tea, maybe about 10 small cups in all. It was good tea and I wasn't really a fan of tea without milk or sugar before yesterday. I was hooked on the jasmine tea. They used real jasmine flowers. It smelled wonderful. So I bought some. We also got to try tea cakes and these tea fruits which were like dried fruits but they had some tea flavor in them. I couldn't taste the tea flavor, but they were yummy little snacks, so I got some of those also. I think the store was called Ten Fu's Teas or something like that.

We went to KFC to have dinner with Caroline after that and I had chicken wings and a coleslaw like cup of corn, peas and carrots. It was not bad. I had an orange drink that was very strange. It wasn't like Hi-C and I think it was supposed to be something like it.

We went to the plaza across the street and watched the techno dancers for maybe half an hour. They just kept going and going. There were people of all ages doing these synchronized dances, it really reminded me of DDR. Some people (guys) would show off by throwing in extra spins. And there was definitely one guy who was smoking a cigarette and dancing. Not to be outdone, a girl later on was on her cell phone as she continued dancing. We walked to the other side of the plaza and saw the couples slow dancing. I think this goes on every week. It's so cool.

We saw some of the strollers with the mechanical dolls pulling the stroller forward. It looks like a cool toy, but what a weird message because all the dolls are white.

Headed over to McDonald's bar after awhile (Youth Year Beer Bar is the actual name of it) and chilled there for the rest of the night. Met more teachers and I finally saw one of the other Indian teachers, Dinesh. Didn't talk to him just because I didn't want to be all like "Hey I'm brown too!" There is a Vivek here but I haven't met him so far. Haha, something really funny happened and I had no clue. The other night at this bar, I met a Chinese student whose American name is Bill Gates. Apparently he likes me. He liked my demeanor? I was really quiet the night we met so I guess he liked that I wasn't an obnoxiously loud drunk American. It was funny because other than saying our names we didn't talk at all that night. Oh China.