Last night was Dinner-on-a-Stick Night. We walked around our area and bought as much street food as possible. It was great. In the process I ate my first "chuanr" which is food on a stick. It looks like this: 串, and you can find signs made out of ropelights hanging all over the place in that shape. So we just followed the chuanr signs. It's really "chuan" but in Beijing they throw "r" on the end of almost anything ending with an "n" sound.

Also, last night we accidentally stumbled upon a prostitution alleyway. Awkward. We kept our heads down and walked quickly. These girls were dressed skankily and sitting in lighted windows in an unlit alley. It was so weird that that is only 6 blocks from where we live. For the record, I think prostitution is probably one of the grossest things in the whole world.

Derick, the Professor, Cowboy, and I did this street food night. Then Cowboy departed from us, and we remaining people went and saw Lust Caution at a movie theater. It was the China-edited version, so if there were naughty bits, they have been expertly removed by the People's Republic. And since it was an Ang Lee movie, I think there probably were naughty bits. The movie was kind of slow. And not too great. Not bad, but not that good. It was about a woman intentionally becoming a man's mistress so that her friends could assassinate him and stop the movement he was involved in within the Chinese government. It was a good storyline, it just moved slowly. I understood a little of the dialogue, which was nice. There were English and Chinese subtitles at the bottom of the screen, too. The movie had parts spoken in Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese (yeah, they have their own dialect), English, and Arabic. Therefore, probably no one in the little teatre understood what was being said all the time. Real cool, Ang.

Thanksgiving was not bad here in China. I went out with some friends to a hotel restaurant where there was a traditional American turkey dinner on buffet. It was alright, though I think nothing can replace being with family for Thanksgiving. I also sort of got to video call my family at my sister's house for the holiday, which was a nice consolation.

Tomorrow night I'm going to see an acrobatics show! I got free tickets from the school. How cool is that? Contorted Chinese people? Sign me up! Haha. No, I hear the acrobatics shows here are amazing. I'm excited about it. We'll see how it goes.

Now time for Thanksgiving 2.0.

T