First, I took my final for my Manufacturing and Warehousing class. Let's just say... I'm not going to be in charge of a warehouse anytime soon...
After the final, I was REALLY wanting to swim. Swimming is a big stress reliever for me, and I just haven't been the same without it. So, Caroline and I hunted down the outdoor pool on campus. We managed to get a certificate to access the pool surprisingly easily. We just presented our ID card, a passport sized photo, and some cash, and they made our certificate on the spot!
There are two 50 meter, 8 lane pools! There is one that is three feet deep that has no lane ropes. It is used for playing. Caroline and I counted nearly 200 people in that pool today, but luckily the pool was big, so they were all spread out. The other pool is deeper and has lane ropes and BACKSTROKE FLAGS!!!! YAY! So of course we go over to the lap pool to swim, but we get stopped by the guard at the gate. A nice man translated for us, and apparently we had to have a deep water certificate. We have to pass a swimming test first, but they only administer the tests on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so sadly, we couldn't swim for real today.
Instead, we splashed around in the play pool, just enjoying being immersed in a body of water bigger than our showers. It felt so good to stretch out and feel the water again, and naturally we got stared at for being athletic American girls. It's always so awkward being watched. We swam across the pool to the other side, and when we finished, our friend had wandered over and informed us that we were professionals. Haha of course we are :) Our friend then joined us, and we taught him a little bit about swimming. He was so thankful, "What an opportunity! I am not worthy!" haha silly Asians. He asked where we were from, and when we told him Atlanta, Georgia, he said "Oh! The capital! A famous city!" He also pointed to his eye and told Caroline, "your... your... your eyeball is BLUE!" HAHAHAHAHA sooooo cute! He said that my eyes were yellow? What?
My comments about the pool:
-The bathrooms were all squattys, and they did not have stall doors. Just basically squat in the middle of the locker room, out in the open... yeah.
-The women all wore one pieces and swim caps.
-The men walked around in swim suits that looked like boxer briefs, but they had them pulled up above their belly buttons!
-The men also like to stand around and smoke cigarettes by the pool. Sick.
-The pool has no chlorine in it.
-The pool bottom had so much dirt and algae on it that it was completely BLACK. I didn't even want to put my face in the water, and I tried so hard not to swallow any of it.
I'm taking my camera when I go to the pool tomorrow to document these strange events.
For dinner tonight, a group of ten of us went out to The Kro's Nest. It is a pizza place modeled after Fellini's in Atlanta, and it was started and is owned by a 24-year-old Georgia Tech graduate!!!! He has opened six more locations in Beijing, and his business is making a KILLING! He's a friend of one of the guys on the program, but unfortunately he was at a different location tonight. Nevertheless, the pizza was AMAZING! So delicious! It was pricey, and I was expecting small portions (like meal in China). Caroline and I decided to split a grilled chicken salad and a medium "Fresh Pizza" (mushrooms, green peppers, broccoli, tomatoes, cheese, black olives). I was shocked when this HUGE pizza was delivered to our table, along with the most gigantic salad that could have fed by entire family of five! It was ridiculous how much food we got, and it was all so tasty! It was definitely worth the price. Every single rumble.
Haha, as a side note: the currency in China is called Yuan or Renminbi, abbreviated RMB. Hence, we've been called the currency Rumbles. haha! David Schwartz also likes to call them Rumplestiltskins, and sometimes we use the term bones. Common lingo among our group is "How many bones did that cost you?" or "I just spent 10 rumplestiltskins!" or "I'm all out of rumbles...". If yuan is the equivalent of dollars in the US, then wu jiao is the equivalent of cents in the US. We like to call the wu jiao Rumblies, and I like calling them Little Ones, like "the bike parking costs two rumblies" or "I don't have any little ones." From hear on out, I will refer to Chinese yuan or RMB as Rumbles.
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