friday night was fun. a couple of people had birthdays, and it seems several entire classes were invited to the party. we went to some restaurant that had a buffet... since I'd forgotten to eat for most of the day, I thought I'd be hungry, but I really didn't end up eating much. had lots of little snacky foods, and several bowls of ice cream. :) when I went and got some meat from the "bbq" section... I dunno, I just sorta lost my appetite looking at it. it just.. looked.. like animal flesh. which it is. but normally I don't think of it that way. I ate a bit of it - the beef tasted nice - but went back to salad and snacks after that. eventually the birthday cakes came out, and 'happy birthday' was sung in english, spanish, chinese and possibly some other language. some spanish guy on stage lead the singing iirc, and then he went on to sing some spanish songs and chinese ones... there were other performers earlier in the evening too, but I liked the spanish guy best.
oh, but about birthday cakes - there were three of them, and two birthdays. it seems one was made for the sole purpose of throwing in the birthday girl's face :) lol. it almost devolved into a full-out food fight... almost... luckily it didn't. there was just a lot of cake around hte floor and smeared over one chair. the waitresses didn't look too happy :)
after this the party was moving to some club... open bar, 100 kuai. quite a good deal. but last time I was in a club I could barely breathe, and 100 kuai worth of alcohol is probably quite a bit for me - on a school night too - so I decided to go home. maybe some other time when I can get in for free, I can try. but I didn't want to pay 100 kuai and then have to leave after a few minutes.
oh, I forgot to mention... everyone else was getting taxis to the party. it really wasn't far away, so I decided to just ride my bike. got a little disoriented at one point, but then I saw the giant mall sign that mostly matched the characters someone had written for me, so I headed over there... and while I was trying to figure out where in the mall the restaurant was, I called pete, and found out that him and jon had been wandering around just outside the mall for a while. so we met up and eventually found the restaurant, which was on the fourth floor from the ground, but the floor was called 2F.
the bike ride home was quite nice. the streets were very quiet, hardly any bikes, and there was a stretch with almost no cars too. as I got close to the school, there were more and more taxis, until it was just a sea of taxis and I could barely get my bike through.
it was somewhere around 9ish when I got home, I think. pete started teaching me about go again, and we ended up playing until midnight. good thing classes don't start until 10 on monday (saturday is monday this week, and vice versa. that's the chinese way of doing holidays. weird, huh?).
so satrday, which was a monday schedule, I really wasn't paying much attention to class. played some more go during lunch. after class me and pete headed out to zijingang campus to meet our partners for this weird project thingy. we had dinner together and chatted for a while, tried to figure out what stuff to do for the project... oh yeah, I need to write an email still. I should do that now. afer dinner we went to the dorm (well, the guys dorm - guys aren't allowed in the girls dorm) and ended up playing a game very much like ludo. it had pictures of planes on it, and if you landed on certain spots you could "fly" ahead, but apart from that the rules were the same. including that annoying requirement to roll a 6 - by the time we had to leave, we were still nowhere near the end of the game.
we took the bus out this time, but it was only 20 minutes... I think next time I'll ride my bike. that way I'll be able to bike around campus (zijingang is huuge) and not worry about having change for the bus. the only problem will be finding my way there - street signs seem kinda.. optional, here. and random. I'm starting to understand the big ones on the main roads, at least, but I often forget to look for them until they've gone past - they come a fair bit before the actual intersection.