This week we have been taking a class on Asian Culture and Communication and one of the things we talked about in class is deflecting praise... if a Chinese person pays you a compliment, such as "You are so smart," you say, "No, no, I have only studied hard."
So... there's a boy that works down in the lobby and someone has given him the name Samuel. A few nights ago my friend Lacey and I were hanging out with Samuel and struggling through a conversation. He starts asking me about my major (piano) and then says something with the word "beautiful." I thought he was asking if I played the piano beautifully, so I repeated the question back to him, "Do I play the piano beautifully?" to check for clarification, and he says, "No no. You are so beautiful." I laughed and quickly replied, "No no," thinking I was being a good Chinese person, and he looked at me with a confused face and said, "What, I can't tell you you are beautiful?"
Yeah. So that didn't work.

Here are some things I've done the past few weeks...

I climbed the great wall! It was very foggy that day and super humid so you couldn't see far and we sweat out half our weight. But it was still pretty awesome.

I ate hot pot with my team. Hot pot is where you have pots of boiling broth and you order different meats and vegetables and cook them in the broth. Interesting. This is me with my team leader Kimmie.

These are my team mates, Lacey on the left and Meshea in the middle. 

I went to the summer palace with some friends yesterday. Neat place, but we never actually saw the summer palace. Apparently it's kind of tricky to find. 

At first we thought this might be the palace, but it turns out it was just another temple. 

That's all for now! If you want to follow me on instagram my name is bigrach08. 

Rachel