Hangzhou is a city.

As of this writing on this wednesday the 26th of June I still am without internets. I finally got my computer plugged in and charging, so at least I can type these up and create a cascade of blog entries for super happy fun time reading whenever I get my internet fixed. They tell me this should be tomorrow. We shall see.

As I expected, sleeping on the plane was impossible. I think of the twelve and a half long hours on the plane to Shanghai I slept for about 45 minutes of it total. The three of us all traveling from UT all got to sit together, and I was the aisle seat for both flights. The flight from Shanghai was especially interesting, since white people were in extremely short supply the three of us sitting together were a bit of an oddity, and the people around us chose to talk to me about it. I was the most accessible and thus became the liason for our group, and I must admit it helped the time pass. The flight wasn't too bad, the old lady sitting in the row in front of us got cut off - it was hilarious. In addition to that we had a child behind us, who wasn't much of a problem with the exception of 20 minutes during the middle of the flight. The child slept the rest of the time, but those 20 minutes were brutal. The child woke up, and the only speaking it had mastered were how to say mom and dad in Chinese. The child said this nonstop in the 20 minutes she wasn't sleeping, and at one point the parents had her raised up behind my sit to let her look at me. All 3 of us had moments where we nearly struck an infant. "Baba...mama...baba...mama" for 20 minutes without pause and a constant tempo of baba's and mama's as it annoyingly struggled to dominate its parents attention.

After getting off the plane we met 3 of the Chinese roommates. Oddly enough, not our roommates but some random ones that came to meet us. They were nice, and the ride on the public bus to Hangzhou gave me a chance to catch 3 hours of sleep. The only thing eventful and worth mention is that at some point in time during my sleep on the bus my phone escaped my pocket without my knowledge. Thus today I had to buy a new phone. I was not thrilled.

My roommate is fantastic, we get along well and I'm sure I will have some great stories from interacting with this guy. When I first met him in the room I was so sleep deprived that I shook his hand literally 4 times. I introduced myself and shook his hand. After he asked me where I was from, I told him I was from Texas and shook his hand. I asked him to write his Chinese name for him, and after he wrote his I chose to write mine, then I gave him back then pen and shook his hand. But wait, there is still the best of the four handshake setups. Following this I gave him his gift, told him I was going to go shower...and shook his hand. I apologized before going to bed for being a bit happy with the handshaking and that I was just nervous and tired. Each time I shook his hand I didn't realize I was doing it until I saw the weird, awkward look on his face and noticed we were shaking hands. Apparently after I hit the 30 hour mark of no sleep I start shaking everyone's hand. Who knew? On a side note, the gift he gave me was a Pabst Blue Ribbon, which I think is a fantastically random if horribly tasting gift.

The shower is by far the thing I have most enjoyed so far in Hangzhou. It is glorious, not only do I have my own shower and bathroom, but the bathroom has this fancy little fan that you turn on when you shower. When this is activated it blows hot air and turns the bathroom into a sauna, effectively letting me shower in a steam room. If it weren't for the faint smell of mildew that slowly gnaws away at sanity I probably wouldn't ever leave the shower. So at the top of the list of things I enjoy we have the shower, and after that comes the food. My roommate chose some crazy food for me for lunch and dinner, things which I will get pictures of tomorrow, and they were almost all fantastic. The one exception was the water that had seaweed floating in it that tasted like how a fish market smells. I love how China has this weird ability to take the oddest smells and put them into food. The fish market smell water ranks up there with the milkshake that tasted like a bike tire smells and tofu that tasted like how a barn smells. It is so fascinating you almost don't mind the taste as you try to figure out how they did it. Almost. For dinner we had some spicy mian (noodles), and oh the goodness. I finally found some spicy food in Hangzhou, and this stuff knocked my pants off. In classic Marco family style the spicier it got the faster I ate, and as I write this 2 hours after dinner my lips are still feeling the slight painful tingle from the mian. Perfection.

The most exciting thing that has happened so far is the roommates' and teachers' response to my Chinese. I must admit, it is really inflating my ego. I won't tell all the stories of how I've surprised people at restaurants and bars by understanding everything they say (something that I couldn't do completely in Beijing, but the accent is so much easier here). I think learning how to understand the intelligible people in Beijing really helped me, that and the last semester of Chinese I took with rapid Chinese speaking in a southern accent every day. The most important and exciting result of this is that I got a special interview just now with the program director and the academic diretor. They were impressed from some of the things I had helped them explain and in Chinese and act out to students earlier, and when I walked into the office (which was apparently a zone where we could speak English and ask questions, something I didn't know) and asked all my questions in Chinese, they were impressed and asked me to sit and talk awhile. Hence, the interview. They asked me if I feared new words, and then asked if I feared being in the top level. I said I didn't fear either, but the way she chuckled and smiled as she asked, I had this feling that whether I said I was afraid or not she was going to put me in the highest level. I got the feeling they weren't sure yet what textbook I was going to be using, but I am quite sure they are going to try and kick my butt and I am going to really enjoy it.

Challenge time. Hoo ha.