An All-American Weekend and The Longest Tunnel

Maybe it wasn't completely an all-American weekend, but it sure felt like it! I took the weekend off to go to Chengdu and visit some friends. It was a great time. The first night I went to the new and bigger Peter's Tex/Mex Grill for dinner...oh a cheeseburger never tasted so good. So then I went with Carole to one of the big family's apartments where we watched The Amazing Race together. I got to sleep late, and the next day was filled with fun. We first headed to the New Balance store to have a look (kan yi kan), then headed to Joyce's BBQ to have some ribs (those were pretty awesome too). Then we headed to a place to buy some scrolls with characters and pictures painted on them and we played hide and seek with this little girl that lives near the shop. She was so cute, I wish I had a picture of her. Afterwards, we went to Starbucks...yes, you have read correctly, there's a Starbucks in the Du! I had my Grande Mocha Frappuccino while sitting outside enjoying watching all the people passing by and the mean employee who kept kicking people out of the Starbucks chairs outside if they hadn't bought anything from there. I guess it makes sense, but he was relentless. So next we bought some DVDs in a very shady way...we were taken upstairs in this electronics building and pulled behind closed doors to look at them and make a purchase. Slightly illegal maybe. Grilled cheeses for dinner while we watched Coach Carter together and chatted the evening away. I do have to say my four hour flight delay was pretty boring and now I'm reading some mindless book called "Confessions of a Shopaholic" which, if you know me well, doesn't really seem like it would interest me at all. In all honesty, it doesn't, I'm reading it for a little help to get to sleep at night and the chance to get my mind off of work all the time. Today I headed out to our new freshman campus...it's HUGE! To get there you have to ride a bus for 45 minutes and they go in this tunnel that's the longest one I've ever been through. It's so long, when you're in the middle you can't even see the opening of either side. It was like going under 4-5 mountains. Pretty cool I thought. I really like the campus though, it's away from the city so the air is cleaner, the grass is greener (or wait, maybe it's just that there's grass), there's no traffic, but there's also nothing to do out there besides outdoor stuff, which I would be ok with, but for 7,000 students, there's only one television in the student center and only 100 computers in the lab. Maybe they need to check the numbers, but that ratio is way off. So now refreshed and ready for some more of the week to throw it's best at me. Show me what you got.