Around the World in 85 Days: 毕竟这是一个小世界 It's a Small World After All

So I moved my stuff into my dorm (which was actually pretty nice). And waited for orientation or whatever was going to happen that day. Sadly, I don't really have pictures of hands-down-the-most-ridiculous-small-world-story-ever-in-the-existence-of-man but it'll be good anyways.

I guess David (my roommate) and I got chummy quickly enough. Chummy enough for him to make funny faces for the camera...

Favorite

View out of the window in my dorm!

STORY TIME!!!
Ok so I believe on Monday morning (ish) we (all of the students in the CLERC program) split up into a couple groups for a campus tour of Beijing University (henceforth referenced as BeiDa which is its abbreviation in Chinese).

The tour itself was quite non-descript, and our tour guide's English was good but not perfect so sometimes... he didn't know the word for "gym" and so he'd explain it in Chinese and point and... you get the picture lol. Campus itself was relatively nice compared to China (b/c there are green growing things on campus, not just concrete).

Anyways as we walking along the lake, we passed the other tour group. And as I'm looking at the other students I see this girl who looks a lot like Lisa Hartwig [who, for those of you who don't know is the best friend of a girl I dated in high school named Jordan Langdon who is still pretty much my best friend...although at the time we were mad at each other...but now were not...k]. So I kind of tried to pull a sneaky double-take so that in case it wasn't her (which statistically was almost assured) I wouldn't look like a creeper. But as our groups kept walking towards each other we both kind of saw each other at the same time and this is pretty much what happened:

Woah
Woah
Wait
Waaaaaiiitttt.
Addison?!
.... oh em gee totally just spaced on your first name. Sara Hartwig's sister?!
WOAH
Addison freaking Jenkins what the freak are you doing here?
*recovering* LISA! What are YOU doing here?!
I'm in a Chinese program.
Wait, you're in CLERC?
Oh-Em-Gee we're in the same program.
Woah.
What are the chances of that?
This is crazy.
I know! I haven't seen you in years.
Yeah like... 5... or 7? Since we graduated high school.
Holy freak.
Wow.
...

Yeah everyone else pretty much probs thought we were totes craycray <-- hipster sentence.
So we chatted for a second and then had to go our separate ways but we exchanged phone numbers and met up later that afternoon.

It was 4th of July so we went to Lush. Which I'm pretty sure is the only time I went there. And I almost had an awkward moment when one of the guys in the group was going to buy everyone drinks and so I was like:
'uhh hey you don't need to buy me one'
But trying to be discreet about it so I didnt have to go into the whole "I dont drink and I'm a Mormon and I blah blah blah"
But I was a little too discreet and so I don't think he actually heard me.
Luckily, I was saved when he decided he didn't want to spend all his money on us (or didn't have enough...) hooray! haha

Sometime during the first week or so I went out with people to ... oh dang I can't remember the name of the fancy western area where all the embassies are? Anyways we went there:

French Embassy. Notice the artistic and confusing cows on the grass. What do the mean?!

Schmancy* building near the really schmancy* mall (well for China at least)

*"schmancy" is Schmaddisonhuar (one of several languages I speak fluently) for "fancy"

Teh Fancy Buildings under construction ...ish

Mushroom! ...selling food?

Le Boeing

Later I realized that these mushroom things are actually kind of common.
They're like air vents for something underground... the subway?

Later (during the first week or two I believe) we went to Wang Fu Jing which is this super famous touristy alley/street thing. Some of it is super commercialized like Times Square or what not (see below:)