Hello again! Sorry this new update is so late, but I've been quite busy here with the start of classes! Each day at a Chinese college, there's about two to four hours of homework every day - but at most, there are four hours of classes a day, so while it's busy, it's not a terribly large amount of work.

After class, I usually go to the school cafeteria to pick up some food. Two traditional staple foods in China are rice and noodles. Rice is very common down south, while noodles are more common up north. Beijing has moderate weather (much like Michigan or the Northeastern United States); hot in summer, cold in winter, so I often eat both rice and noodles.

Other common, cheap foods are baozi - dumplings! It's dough wrapped around a central filling, be it beef, pork, or vegetables (chicken does not seem popular as a baozi filling). They're very tasty and quite cheap. For a little bit more money, you can buy a noodle or a rice dish. One of my favorites is chicken with vegetables and soy sauce.

The Chinese love sauces and spices. One of the most common is soy sauce, a sauce with a rather unusual flavor to many Westerners. It's quite good, however; I bought some for use when I make my own rice!

Another popular spice is Five Spice, so named because it is supposed to have all five of the traditional Chinese flavors mixed in; "hot", bitter, sour, sweet, and salty. The first one, "hot", also translates to spicy, pungent, and a few other terms. Personally, I find it tastes like strong black pepper.

Juice isn't popular here, except for some fruit juices (I see peach juice a lot). What is popular is ice tea; sold in bottles, it's quite convenient. The problem for me is that I really don't like cold tea; I have to drink it warm or not have it at all. Still, water bottles are also cheap, so that's what I buy more often than not.

Six more words for those of you still keeping up (shouldn't be too hard, I've given you about a month!)

yaoshi 钥匙 (pronounced yow-shee) It means key.

kan 看 (pronounced kahn) See, look, read.

ting 听 (pronounced ting) Listen.

chi 吃 (pronounced chee) Eat.

fan 饭 (pronounced fan) Meal (as in dinner meal).

ma 吗 (pronounced ma) Indicates the sentence is a question.

le 了(pronounced luh) Indicates, among other things, that an event occured in the past.

你吃饭了吗？

我吃饭了。

Ni chi fan le ma? Have you eaten yet?

Wo chi fan le. I've eaten.

This is also commonly used as a greeting in China; it's quite useful!

再见！

-Tom