太陽出來喜洋洋！愛

The sun came out which makes me very happy!

Today is day four of my Chinese life, and my last day of summer before classes start tomorrow, so I figure I will do one last post before I have to start studying Chinese all day every day and going to class and doing homework. But don't get spoiled and think I will be writing so often, I am just taking advantage of the fact that I now have internet access in my dorm room, which right now feels like a huge luxury.
For four days I have just been eating, speaking, and absorbing, as well as adapting to small changes, like new smells. I never realized before how much weight I put on how things smell. Certain things are comforting smells: the smell of my house when a fresh challah has just been baked, Jenny's baby lotion smell, Zoe's slightly cat-like odor. In Hangzhou, while I feel like I am adapting relatively well to the huge change of speaking a different language all the time and only understanding half of what is going on around me, it is the smallest things like the smell of decomposing sewage in the street, the lovely smell of car exhaust, and even the smell of unfamiliar foods that really gets to me and makes me think about the fact that I have entered into a completely different world. You wouldn't think that something as small as smelling the soap that I brought from home would make me feel better, but it does. (For those of you who like to joke about my non-fictional aversion to showers, this must be a shocking fact.)
I also realize that in this blog so far I have talked a lot about myself and less about China itself. The school that is the host institution for my program is called Zhe Jiang (the province that I am in, of which Hangzhou is the capital) Gong Ye Daxue, meaning Zhe Jiang Institute of Technology. This means, as it means at any Institute of Technology (and especially in China) that the boys far out number the girls (a fact that when I brought up with my roommate today made her hit me). It has 30,000 students and a very enclosed campus with three main gates. The city of Hangzhou, which has almost seven million people, pretty much engulfs you as soon as you step out of a gate. It is loud, filled with many motorized and just as many man-powered moving machines all rushing to get somewhere. There are restaurants, street vendors, small animals, markets with fruits, meats, bread, teas, and pretty much anything else that you might want to buy. It has also been cloudy and kind of smoggy, but today the sun came out for the first time and that was a wonderful thing (and I learned the word for sun in Chinese).
People have been asking about what news I have gotten about Mccain's VP and the outside world in general. My answer is not much. But this is just because I have not sought it out, not because it is not accessible. There is an English language newspaper that I have yet to read, and soon when I am drowning in characters I will probably procrastinate by going to NewYorkTimes.com or something to catch up with the English speaking world.