Another exciting day in Beijing, though thankfully not as busy as most. Got to take my time waking up today. Went over to the language building on campus and spent a while trying to figure out how to read my schedule on the boards that were placed outside. Finally got my Spoken Chinese and Reading Chinese class schedule set up. I don't get to pick my elective courses until Friday. Afterwards, I headed over to the CIEE office and they escorted the group of us over to a restaurant to meet the host families we would be staying with for our homestays. I think I got a pretty good family for my homestay. I'll be living with them for one month starting in October. One of the teachers from my program stayed with this family when he was in the program a few years ago and said they are a very good family. The man we're staying with is a retired physics professor from Beida. His son and granddaughter also live with him (I also heard the son makes amazing food!). The best part is that his house is about a 5 minute walk from the campus West gate. Some students have a 40 minutes subway ride every morning to get to campus, so I'm very thankful that his house is close. Should be an interesting experience. He actually walked us over to his house to show us where it was and even walked us back to the campus to make sure we knew the way.

Afterwards, I met back up with a group from my program to go shopping at the Pearl market. It was about a 1 hour subway ride to get there, but the Pearl Market was so much fun. My chinese really isn't that great yet, so I wasn't ready to do a lot of haggling. One of my classmates' mom is a flight attendant and apparently flight attendants share places to shop with each other, so he took us to an electronics store. The others had fun buying a bunch of stuff. I really didn't need anything. Later, with the help of a friend I managed to buy a really nice white ceramic watch (a knock off, of course). I think I got a pretty good deal on it.  I think Kyle had the most fun today with the shopping. He was really excited about haggling to get good prices for stuff. He was really good at it too. I have to learn from him! He kept jumping into deals to drive down the prices. I learned that it's best to shop in groups of 2s or 3s. If he wanted a lower price and the person wasn't budging, I would walk over to him and say "走吧" which means, let's go. So he would look like he was walking away and they would usually call after him to lower the price. Pretty effective system I think. They managed to get fake LV wallets for like 30 Kuai (about 4.50 USD). Not a bad deal. Overall it was a good learning experience, but I need to improve my Chinese a lot more. We also stopped at a McDonalds to grab dinner before heading back to campus. I had trouble ordering since I've only learned Chinese words for Chinese food and not Chinese words for American foods. It was an interesting experience.