Shhh.... Don't tell....

...but I pull into parking lots and side streets in order to avoid having to stop at red lights on hills. You see, I just dropped Janson off at the airport and while he's gone I'm using his truck, which happens to be a stick shifter. I'm slowly getting the hang of it, but as Murphey's Law dictates, I tend to stall it on the really short green lights and get going again about the time it turns yellow. I can feel I'm getting better with practice, but I am still pretty nervous while driving. And starting up on hills is the bane of my stick-shift driving experiance. As stressful as learning to drive a standard has been, I'm glad I'm doing it, now if there is ever an emergency and I have to drive a stick, I can get behind the wheel with confidence, well... more confidence than before.

I'm finding that as nice as it is to be eating familiar foods again, I wish I could be heading back to China right away.
The food there was delicious- well, for the most part- I mean, there were somethings like the pig lower intestine and the tree fungus which I found appallingly gross, and there were things like the tomato and egg dish and some of the spices which I didn't like at first, but by the end I was not only used to, but really enjoyed. And of course, there was jiaozi and xiao long bao and some of the vegtables which I miss dearly. But, even more than the different foods, I miss the simple sense of adventure of eating out; not knowing what something is, or what it has in it. Sometimes that sense of adventure gets old and thankfully I quickly learned some of the names of the dishes that I really liked so if all else failed I could order a familiar dish, or if I was really not feeling adventurous I could go to KFC, which I did maybe 8 or 9 times.
Towards the end of the semester I was getting to be a familiar face at one particular resteraunt. They had really good jiaozi and lots of choices (with pictures) on ther menus. There were 5 or 6 fuwu yuan (sp?) that work there that knew me by sight and they were always friendly and smiling. They were patient with me when I had no clue what they were saying and when they were trying to figure out what I was trying to say. On my last night in Beijing my friend Matteo and I went to this resteraunt. He has much better Chinese than I do and he helped me tell them that I was going back to Meiguo (USA) and that I really liked their resturant and would miss the good service and good food. They got all smilely (which was really cute) and we said goodbye. I really do miss them and their good food.... If only they weren't a 18 hour travel day away.