Forgot

To tell you about Friday night's dinner with Harry. I think he is a hidden treasure. We had asked him to take us to a nice Chinese restaurant and then to the mall where he and his friends go. We started out by walking through a part of campus that I had never seen.....past the track (where he "confessed" when I asked him, that he was very good at the 100 meter dash. He is built like Sammy so that didn't surprise me.); past the chinning bars, past the special dining room for students who don't eat pork etc. And then finally we came to a main street but not one that we had been on before.

He took us to a noisy and/but wonderful restaurant. First they brought a chair for my pocketbook and then they covered it so that no one would steal it. Then they brought us a tray of cold appetizers. I chose sweet fava beans which were delicious and we also ordered 2 COLD beers. The menu was in Chinese and English and it had pictures. We decided that tasting many foods was more important than finishing every thing we ordered. We settled on cold, boneless smoked fish, eggplant slices stuffed with meat then battered and deep fried, crisp duck skins (Burt thought he was orderind duck but when it came it was just the skin) which was served like moo shoo pork, a green vegetable sauteed in soy sauce, and beef with pancakes (the beef was almost too spice to eat but the pancakes were delicious [like IHOP silver dollar pancakes except that you cut them in half and filled them with the beef[). We left about half the food and we couldn't take it home because we don't have a refrigerator in our room. Burt like the eggplant so maybe we have a convert!!!!

I noticed that Harry ate very little while Burt and I were eating even tho' we kept encouraging him to eat and then when he thought we were finished he began to eat heartily. He is a very nice, considerate man!

After dinner which cost about $25 for the three of us we went to "Harry's mall" which turned out to be like a Wal Mart so we only stayed for a few minutes and then we walked back to our hotel.

It is amazing but no matter what time we are out, the streets are filled with people. The students sleep in dorms 4 to a room and they have no air conditioning and no hot water so I can understand why they stay out half the night...their rooms are just too hot. But I don't know why the rest of the populations stays out so late (including the babies).

For hot water, the students have to go to a community building and fill thermoses with boiling hot water which they then carry to their rooms and mix with cold water for bathing. Considering the primitiveness of this and the fact that I don't think many use deodorant (altho' I may be wrong about that) there is minimal body odor on close contact. Also, in the winter which is VERY COLD in Wuhan, their dorms arent' heated. To me it is amazing that they are able to study and I guess they don't sleep much at night because the dorm is so uncomfortable so it is accepted practice to sleep in class which is heated in winter and air conditioned in summer.

OH! I forgot...Harry is the first one in his family to go to college. His parents are farmers who live about two hours by bus from HUST and they now work in a factory and his sister who is a year younger than him dropped out of high school and she also works in the factory. None of his cousins have gone to college either. He is majoring and English and international trade as are many of the TAs and that's why there English is so good.

Cheers....Shelley