rain rain rain

It's been raining here since Monday, and will probably continue to rain for the next week, so I went out today and invested in an umbrella. I'm told that it's usually pretty dry here, except around the beginning of October when it rains quite a lot. It hasn't been raining very hard, but just without stopping. Quite strange, and a pain to do laundry since nothing will every dry in such a moist environment.

Next Monday is Chinese National Day, so the whole week is considered a holiday. I'm not quite sure what I'm doing, since major travelling is a bad idea beacuse the whole country is off of work and will be doing just that. I don't mind being a tourist, but when everyone and their whole family is travelling, I don't think I'd have too much fun. Instead, I'll try to work more on my Chinese. It's coming along pretty slowly, which is frustrating, but at least I'm making progress.

In general, other than the rain, everything here is great. The Chinese seem to place a lot more importance on food than most people in the US, which is good for me since the food here is so wonderful. Yesterday I had dinner cooked by my friend Mr. Shi for me, one of my Chinese teachers, another teacher from the university, and Keith and his family (he's from Texas, his wife's from Panama, and they and their three young kids are here studying Chinese). The meal was amazing. If dinner for 2 or 3 consists of 3 dishes, rather than making more of those 3 dishes to serve more people, Chinese people tend to make more dishes, which means you get to try a little bit of many different things. The table is covered with many small dishes, and then more are brought and set on top of them. Soup is served at the end of the meal because it supposedly helps with digestion.

Well it's getting to be dinner time so I'm going to go - I just wanted to update you all on what was going on here.