View of the campus outside my dorm

Despite the unbelievably painful memorization-and-recall process (what wouldn't I give for a photographic memory), I actually really enjoy reading and writing chinese. Some characters I especially like and my new favourite one is this:

串

Combined with the character 肉 in front, it means kebabs (肉串, rou chuan) and it makes me happy because it looks exactly like a stick with meat on it. Actually it also looks like a stick with marshmallows on it... I wonder what's chinese for s'mores? Strictly speaking, the stand-alone character 串 really means "to string together" but I'll take whatever memory aid I can get, so stick of meat it is.

Anyway, before I discovered this extraordinary character, I spent the better part of the day moving into the dorms and going through the hellish registration process. It's like old-school Cornell course exchange before everything went online, except with longer lines, more misinformation, and more running around different buildings on campus. And everything is in Chinese. And no one realized that the chinese take a two-hour lunch break between noon and 2pm (but at least that window of time allowed me to see mom off at the airport for her flight back to Toronto). I started at 9am and it was after 4pm before tuition, insurance, and housing was finally filled out, signed, and paid for. And there's still a health examination left before we get student IDs and finally complete the registration process.

But that's for Wednesday. For the rest of the evening, I met up with Puja, an Iranian-German who I've been emailing for a few weeks since he's also in the one-year language program. We met up with several other students for dinner, which was of course, korean kebabs.

I also met my roomate tonight. She is from Korea and her chinese name is 李升娟, Li Sheng Juan. She speaks Korean and little English. Keeps kimchi in the fridge. Her mandarin is about the same as mine though so we can communicate a little bit - at least we know enough mandarin to be civil to each other. She's very quiet though so we don't talk much. I sure hope we don't have trouble living with each other. They didn't teach us anything in RA training about a situation where roomates speak different languages!