Pizza, Smoothies, and Videos

Hey Folks,

Not much has been going on here in the Middle Kingdom these days. Zhanjiang has been pretty quiet. We wake, we drink tea, we teach, we drink smoothies, we study Chinese, we drink soy milk (thank you melamine!), we eat, and we sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat.

But since I promised to be more diligent at keeping up the blog, here's a little something to keep you all occupied (and fulfill my quota for the week ;-).

First, I would like to share the wealth that we have stumbled upon.

Welcome to YouKu, the Chinese YouTube. I think David is the one who somehow discovered this online gold mine, and we are all eternally grateful. It's vastly superior to YouTube for two reasons:

1. It loads way faster (you don't have to wait for it to load at all if you have a good server)
2. It contains full-length movies, as opposed to just clips. It's fantastic.

I've been taking advantage of this site in my Society and Culture class, since it's hard to describe the culture of Ireland and Scotland and other countries when I've never actually been there.

For those of you interested, here are two videos I found on YouKu, both in Chinese, but both providing you with two things:

1. An visual picture of my surroundings, not only here at ZJ Normal, but around ZJ herself.

2. A glimpse into the ridiculously over-hyped, over-sensationalized, overly-dramatic world of Chinese promotional videos. These are actually pretty tame by comparison.

"A Stunning Visual Tour of the Magnificent City of Zhanjiang"

"A Not-Really-Brief-At-All-History of Zhanjiang Normal University, The Harvard of Southern China"

Like I said, they're both in Chinese, and they don't have subtitles, but for those of you with nothing better to do, it should help you develop a better mental image of what I'm up against.

And now, the most exciting developments of the past week, in no particular order...

1. I found a pizza joint right outside of the school gate. It's not American pizza by any means, but it's some of the best Chinese pizza I've ever had.

2. I got a "Buy 20, Get 1 Free" card at the local smoothie shop. The other guys are SUPER jealous. My favorite flavor is half-mango, half-banana (my own creation). It's delish.

3. David and I made our first excursion to the local pirated DVD store. My pick of the week:

That's all for now. I know this post is pretty boring, but that's okay with us. We're tired of typhoons down here.