Exhausted...

What a week! Woke up at 6:00AM everyday - it's so hard to get used to that... Took the metro for an hour every day to school (I change the lines twice every morning coz this way I usually have a seat on it- the line leaving from here is already full when I get on it- even though its only the 3rd stop!) Chinese ppl i tell ya... They love being crowded... They will just stand waiting for the train wherever they got to the platform from the stairs. They never walk on the platform towards the beginning of the train- and this way the first cars are usually a bit emptier. How stupid of them. School itself is actually really nice, I've made friends with a Spanish girl already, and the rest of the ppl in class are really nice. We're actually from all over the world: France, Switzerland, Indonesia, Russia, Spain, Colombia, Burundi, Canada, Sweden (originally from Iran and Hong Kong), Saudi Arabia... Really all over the world... I understand most of what they say in Chinese in class- maybe even more than the rest of the students - vocabulary wise, but the characters... I hate them!!! Why do I have to learn how to write the stupid things????? Wouldn't mind recognizing some but... Hate writing them. Really.

was a really busy week. There wasn't even one day that I came straight home from school. On Monday I decided to be the good housewife and cook a nice dinner for the both of us- celebrating the first day of school and first day at work. On Tuesday went to take Rob's passport from the visa place and then went to the market to buy some clothes. It was amazing: as soon as I stepped in the building I immediately remembered all the words I need to know in Chinese in order to buy in the market. All the colors names in Chinese came back to me, and all the other words that are very helpful when shopping... The market was crowded as usual, lots of ppl, lots of really ugly clothes- I really had to dig in to find something nice, the smells, the noise... But its still a nice experience...
on Thursday I went to the visa place again- this time for me- to get me the students visa (got all the papers from uni for that) and then went to a deli in a really fancy hotel with Lia the Spanish girl, to buy some nice (and very expensive) cheese...

yesterday was Rob's birthday. So on Wednesday I got him an i-pod as a present, and yesterday I prepared a little celebration for him when he got home from work: I made a pile of blueberry pancakes (don't have an oven- couldn't bake) and I decorated them with gummies and ice cream. I hung balloons in the house, lit up two candles (couldn't find birthday candles here) and put the present on the bed. It was really nice... We went for a foot massage in the evening and then went to a hot pot restaurant (its a restaurant where you sit next to a table that has a hole in it- to put a big pot in the middle - on fire. There's soup in the pot and you order all kinds of raw food like meet and vegetables to put in the soup and fish it out- so you can eat the soup or just the cooked food).

I'm really enjoying my first real weekend in a long time. I haven't been working in a while- so this week it was hard to get used to waking up everyday and having something to do. Its fun being a student again though. Kinda weird after more than 2 years that I wasn't a student.

today we're planning on going to eat dumplings in a restaurant I got a recommendation to. And tonight I'd really love to go out... Haven't gone out in Shanghai since I got here- and I really miss going out here... This city actually has a lot to offer...