Another beautiful day in Beijing. It was quite windy, but that was the perfect thing for keeping the pollution levels down. A thunderstorm broke out during the middle of the day, but thankfully it ended before my class let out. I had 2 classes today followed by an awesome tutoring session. I had to interview 2 Chinese people about their ideal job for my homework and then write a summary paragraph to turn into my teacher for tomorrow. I interviewed my tutor and she had pretty interesting answers. I had a really good session with her. Since I told her last time that I was interested in learning how to understand directions, she had prepared a dialog for me to practice reading with words that I could change in and out of the dialog to have different meanings. She really likes to challenge me. After teaching me a few of the terms, she told me to draw a rough map of campus and tell her how to get from the building we were in back to the dorms. I had a lot of fun with it and learned so much. I wanted to get Bao zi after my session, but the restaurant was closed. So I headed back to the dorms and started on my homework.

By the time I got my summary paragraph finished, I was hungry. So I grabbed 2 classmates and we headed out to the area outside the SouthWest gate to grab some food. We had dinner at a restaurant and then stopped for Bubble tea (which was really good). We went to the bakeries in order to buy mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival, but we couldn't find any flavors we liked. My tutor had told me about a huge bookstore near the SW gate and suggested I buy a book to practice during the session. So I will practice reading and she can help me with the characters I haven't learned yet. I thought it sounded like a pretty good way to learn more vocabulary words, get a better grasp of the grammar and practice reading.

We got directions from the worker at the tea shop (which I could actually understand thanks to my earlier lesson) and headed down to the next block. The bookstore was hard to miss. It was part of an electronics complex in ZhongGuanCun and the book store was on floors 2,3 and 4 of the complex. We ended up spending a good hour there looking around. JK Rowling's new book came out today and they already had copies of it in English at the store. I was tempted to buy it, but I figured I'll just wait until I get back to the states. I really want to focus on my Chinese while I'm here. After wandering around the store for a while, I finally found books I was looking for (and they were in Chinese, there was a separate section for American imports). I had a hard time deciding between The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones and The Fellowship of the Rings. After paging through the three books, I decided to get The Hunger Games. Game of Thrones and the Fellowship are a bit too high above my skill level...I couldn't recognize half of the characters on the first page. Hunger Games, on the other hand, I could manage to read a little bit, but still didn't know all of the characters. I felt like it was an appropriate skill level for me. Melissa bought the Sorcerer's Stone ( I decided to pass on HP since I already have the first book in Chinese back in the states). Before I leave China, I'm planning to go back to the bookstore and buy the Fellowship as well as Game of Thrones. The books are so cheap, it's hard to pass up on. For a soft cover copy of the Hunger Games, I paid less than $4.50 USD! I can't wait to start reading it! I think I'm going to be buying myself quite a few birthday presents from that bookstore! I also want to get my hands on a few movies in Chinese! I really love exploring the city and I wish I had more time to do it. I'm going to end up being up late tonight finishing my homework since I spent so much time wandering the bookstore. I think it was totally worth it though! I can't wait to go back (although I feel like I'll end up spending a lot of money there HAHA)!