:(

I'm very tired and it's only 6:58 pm, this afternoon I started to develop a cough, and I'm not feeling particularly upbeat, but I'll try to make this post cheerful. If I fail, at least you know why.

The hostel E people are no longer standing around in the entrance-way, so I'm guessing that their elections are over. So no more souvenirs. Darn--that's an opposite-of-cheerful thought.

Well, umm, here--I took a picture of the carton of my favorite juice:


Mandarin class is always nice (although it would have been nicer if I wouldn't rather have curled up under a blanket) today we learned about, ahh...umm..., I forget. Vocabulary from Lesson 6. A collection of seemingly unrelated words like "swim," "Beijing opera," and "weather." Actually, not seemingly unrelated. Definitely unrelated. And we listened to our professor sing the Chinese version of Jingle Bells.

For dinner I ate sweet and sour chicken that tasted like Chinese take-out from the U.S.--yum. It came with some sort of cloudy soup with a few beans floating around a chunk of potato--not yum.

Okay, apparently I fail at happiness today, so I'm going to give up now and try again tomorrow.