Happy Monday! Woke up to beautiful weather following the storm. I love days in Beijing after rain storms! The air is so clean and beautiful! Ran off to my first and only class of the day and got my Hanyu test back. I didn’t do horrible, but I couldn’t have done better. I made some stupid mistakes which was because I think I had my 2 exams back to back and my brain was already fried before the test even started. Overall I’m pretty sure my monthly average is a B or B+, so I’m happy with that. It will depend on my scores for the essay and presentation tho, which I still haven’t gotten back. After class, I was waiting around in the office because I was supposed to have lunch with a classmate, but she canceled on my so I ended up going home and sleeping for 2 hours because I was so tired. It was a much needed nap. Ran back to campus to grab food, but the baozi place had already closed, so I grabbed a Taiwan Pancake instead. So greasy and delicious! I need to learn how to make these. After my quick food break, I met up with my tutor and had her help me review grammar. Grammar is definitely the thing I struggle with the most when learning languages. I think it’s because I never really bothered to learn much about English grammar. She did a great job of helping me understand how certain things work. Now I just have to work on remembering the patterns. She’s a really great tutor. I’m so glad I got placed with her. She brought a book along for me to try reading. It was pretty low level, so it wasn’t too hard, but my reading out loud skills are lacking, so it was good practice. I brought along the Hunger Games to check out for me. She said it was a little on the difficult side, but as long as I have a dictionary handy I should be able to manage it. One of these days, I’ll actually start working on it beyond the first paragraph. I think it’s a good way to learn new words and grammar structures. I need to start watching movies too. Wish there was more time in the day!

After tutoring, I headed back home and started working on the test corrections for my hanyu exam. The teacher marked things wrong but didn’t say why, so our homework is to go over all of the mistakes and explain why they were marked wrong. I also had to learn 29 new words for my quiz tomorrow. Thankfully vocab is getting easier and easier to learn since words are starting to combine characters that I already learned. So now, it’s becoming more of deciphering the meaning when combining different characters together. Not so bad! Got to have dinner with my homestay family and it was delicious! He is such a good cook! It makes me miss my Dad’s food. We had some kind of stirfry that consisted of peppers, mushrooms, black fungus, tofu and some kind of meat as well as the salad. I really like salad dressing in China. I have no idea what kind he put on, but it tasted really good. It wasn’t super overpowering like most American salad dressings. After dinner I headed back into my cave to study and answer emails. Practiced magic for a little bit. I’m hoping to go out this weekend and do some street magic! Starting running a virus scan on my computer. I’m so worried that it’s crawling with spyware! Time for me to head to bed and get ready for a long day tomorrow!