"Wo yao yi bei kafei."

As all of the international students are getting busier and busier during the week, we're eating on campus more often than before. Right now, the deciding factor in whether a specific restaurant or dining hall receives our business or not is if we can point at the food that we want. In a dining hall that we discovered today (we don't know what it's called and haven't made up a landmark-based name for it yet), there are about a dozen windows, behind which you can see what's being cooked. A meal costs 4 kuai, which is somewhere between 60 and 80 American cents. And while I still have to point at the food I want, I'm proud to say that I can order a soda or coffee in a complete Chinese sentence now. Baby steps.

Today in the dining hall we noticed that not a single person in the room except us had a drink with their meal.

Reactions to English and our lack of Mandarin have been very interesting to witness. Nearly every Chinese person we've forced to suffer through our broken Mandarin has been willing to laugh with us. They seem to genuinely respect the effort, hand signals and all. Strangely, we learned today that all Chinese students at Peking University must speak at least some English in order to be admitted. They all seem too shy, however, to try. In countries like Spain and Italy, I've countless times attempted to ask a question in the local tongue only to be met with an English response. That has never happened here, even with those students that I now know must know a little English.

I'm disappointed that I haven't been asked to pose for any pictures with locals yet. They seem to be more fascinated by my blonde and redhead friends, especially the tall ones. I do, however, enjoy it when grown men hustle over towards me (especially on the subway) just to smile, say "hello," wave, then walk away. They seem proud that they successfully identified me as an American.

I'm gradually realizing that there is a pretty intense rivalry between the people of Beijing and Shanghai. Some quotes from Beijing-based professors in the past few days: "Shanghai people are good for one thing, and that's cooking in the home." Said as a compliment to a friendly girl who introduced herself as from Shanghai: "Well, you certainly don't look like you're from Shanghai, so that's good."

Tomorrow (Friday) night, a bar called Pyro's is putting on a 'mixer' with free pizza and drinks for kids in our program. We've visited the bar a few times already; it's owned and operated by Aussies, strangely.

As I mentioned in the last blog post, in college I've falled in love with a London soccer club called Arsenal. Before I started my freshman year at BC, I blindly agreed to meet up with some older students who watched Arsenal games on Saturday and Sunday mornings off-campus. What was at first mostly a way to meet new kids eventually snowballed into a real obsession. Before arriving in Beijing, I contacted one of the heads of Arsenal China, the country's supporter club for the team. Soon, I received an e-mail from a guy ironically named Arsally, who gave me the address of a tea house, oddly translated as "Be For Time," where members gather to watch the games. This Sunday night, I'm going to try to make my Arsenal Beijing debut... Arsenal will play Stoke at 1:30pm in England, which makes for a 9:30pm kickoff here. Arsenal Beijing may be 2 people or 100, I really have no idea...or maybe I won't even find the tea house. I don't think Google Maps will show any results for "Be For Time" in Beijing.

I've signed up for a one-hour, once-weekly Tai Chi class, which starts this coming Tuesday. I believe the meetings take place outside, which will be interesting in the freezing temperatures and with the piles of sooty snow that cover the grass.

In attempting to decorate our bland, white-walled room in Shaoyuan #5, we recently purchased an array of obnoxious Chinese New Year decorations from the supermarket. One features a large, 3D Buddha, and several feature gigantic Chinese characters that we can't read.