June 2nd and 3rd

June 2^nd was the stupid humid that I remembered from last time we were in China. You sweat just thinking about going outside. Heidi and I decided to try and find a teahouse in the Botanical gardens that she remembered from last time. We headed off on our bikes but we still don’t quite know our way around so it took a bit of way finding before we got to the botanical gardens. Bikes aren’t allowed in the park so we locked them up and went for a walk. We came to a beautiful pond so I pulled out my camera and the lens completely fogged up. Fortunately, I had my little camera with me as well and it was fine so I could take a couple of pictures. We were focused on finding the teahouse and ended up outside of the park at the “house of one who likes tea” but it didn’t seem to be a restaurant. Beautiful gardens and a pond full of fish that were also looking to be fed but no restaurant. Heidi had to be back on campus for office hours so we decided to head back to the main road where we knew there were restaurants. We ended up finding one called Lotus Café. It was a really nice café but total opposite from yesterday. Just a latte costs 48RMB and they serve spaghetti and the likes and most importantly they have A/C!

A quick stop at the apartment first to fight with the internet some more – we got my computer working but not Heidi’s and then she was off to office hours. By now it was 100% humidity (aka rain) but I walked around a little, did some people watching, bought some fruit and then found Heidi. We’d had such a big lunch that we just went to the cafeteria for a light dinner and then called it a night.

Today was much cooler out. We ran a few errands one of which was a visit to Computer-Mart. It’s a building with three floors of vendors. Each vendor has their own booth. The first floor was for computers and cameras but the booths were spacious and flashy. I saw my camera and the price was actually similar to what I paid in Canada. The second floor was a little more crowded and seemed dedicated to iPhones. Booth after booth of iPhone vendors. The third floor was crammed full of little booths filled to capacity, parents had their children with them at work and it was lunch time so they were following their kids around trying to get them to eat some rice. It seemed like you could buy everything and anything. We just needed a printer cartridge and an Ethernet cable. Shopping done, back to campus to meet the IT people who helped sort out Heidi’s computer. Yeah!

It was nice out so Heidi and I decided to head to West Lake. As mentioned earlier, we still don’t know our way around, add a scaling issue and we almost biked right on past the lake. Fortunately with the Chinese sim card in my phone I am able to use the Maps App and we got ourselves to the lake. After some biking around we met up with the other professor and her daughter and had a great dinner at a restaurant on the side of the lake. The waiters were shy and giggly about having to speak English but we all muddled through – pictures in the menus really makes things easier! We had a nice ride back to campus and now we’re both on our computers and neither of us are connected using the Ethernet cables we worked so hard for!