Today was a chill day. Woke up early to skype my mom and Casey.  Studied for a while and then went out with a group of people for food. We ended up deciding to try the Papa John's restaurant near campus. It was so funny. Papa John's here is a  nice sit-down restaurant. We walked into the restaurant and all of the people there were sitting at the tables eating their pizza with forks and knives. Very amusing. We ended up getting a few appetizers and 3 pizzas to split among the 9 of us. The appetizers sucked. The wings were horrible and had a weird taste to them. Two classmates got a mashed potato with bacon dish that tasted horrible (I'm pretty sure they were instant potatos). At least the pizzas were good...not as good as NYC or Philly pizza, but an acceptable level of good. After lunch, we had planned to go to the market to shop, but most of the people were feeling tired since they were out late the night before, so we ended up heading back to campus. I don't know if it's the fact that the pizza in China isn't as good as the pizza at home or its just eating "american" food after 2 weeks of a strictly Chinese diet, but the pizza did not agree with me at all. I had lunch 8 hours ago and I still feel full...not a very pleasant feeling. I think that might be my first and only attempt at eating "american" food in China. I spent the rest of the day in my room relaxing and working on my homework. Since I switched the section of my one class, I'm not sure where they are in the textbook, so I've been trying to work ahead so I'm not behind them when I go to the new section on Tuesday.

I realized one thing I like about BeiDa is that they have a designated lunch time. There are NO CLASSES on campus between the hours of 12 and 1 so that teachers and students have time to eat lunch. I really like this concept. I wish Drexel had a similar system so I didn't always have to suffer through hours of class without having time to stop and eat. I was pleasantly surprised when I laid out my schedule in Excel and discovered this gem of information.

I find that I'm still stuck in a Drexel mindset as far as classes go. My roommate has been feeling guilty because of all the studying and preparing I've been doing for my classes. It's definitely hard to adjust to a school that doesn't move as fast as Drexel. I find myself wanting to do more studying to work ahead, so that I can be a little bit ahead of my classes. I guess I really don't need to do that here since the pace is so fast, but I still find myself filling my idle time with studying. I think I need to break that habit. I want to start walking around campus and meeting people, not just staying in my room the whole time. I don't know how my classmates do it, but I'm still not comfortable with talking to random people. I still don't know the area too well either, so I haven't done much exploring. I started to realize today how much of the campus I haven't seen because I mostly just walk from the dorms to my classrooms or to the Southwest gate to get food. My classmates showed me a bubble tea place on campus today, which I'm sure I will start going to more often now that I know it's there (rather than braving trying to cross the street to go to the bubble tea place over there). It made me realize how little of the campus I've seen. I think I want to get a bike soon so I can ride it around and explore the campus. I think walking would take way too long.  Hoping to go shopping at the markets tomorrow!