bye!

Tuesday, I helped a teacher at my mom's school rent an apartment, and it's in an incredibly posh apartment complex, with a gym and whatnot, so of course we had to play hooky and look at the gym. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me, so you don't get pictures of the three chandeliers, marble floors, opulent but tasteless fake flower arrangements, and the gigantic frieze of Napoleon leading a charge. Also, you don't get pictures of all the gold, duck-shaped sconces that when looked at from a certain angle appeared to have an arrow sticking out of each of their butts. It was quite something. I had to duck (ha, ha) into the bathroom once, I was laughing so hard. 

On Wednesday, I burnt my left hand and lost my phone. Thankfully, my mom had this (relatively) old phone that someone had given her, so I'm probably going to end up using it until it dies a natural death. It's a fairly nice phone, the only thing that I dislike about it is the fact that it's pink. 

On Friday I went out to dinner with some friends of my mom's, and the music that was played in the Hot Pot restaurant we went to could be described as 'bad traditional Chinese New Year's music sung by tone-deaf three-year-olds who've had too much caffeine'. 

Yesterday, we went out to the Lebanese restaurant for lunch with another teacher who works with my mom. The food was, as always, excellent, and on the bus back we played our little game of 'guess which province that person over there is from', which I almost always win. The interesting thing was that we were almost completely surrounded by people from Xinjiang, an autonomous region, a part of China that borders Tibet, Mongolia, Russia and five of the 'Stans, speaks an old form of Arabic, and is largely Muslim. I don't know if they seemed to be much more in evidence than usual simply because they were the only people out on Spring Festival Eve or what. 

I promise to take lots and lots of photos, and I'll be back on the twelfth of February. 

-Layli