Chengdu

     I arrived in Chengdu on Saturday.  I was picked up from the airport and taken to my apartment.  I'm really surprised by how big and nice the apartment is!  It's kind of dirty but we're planning on cleaning it really thoroughly on Sunday.  I have 2 roommates and we each have our own room.  Anna is from Washington and Lauren is from Alabama.  We get along really well and I'm definitely liking the apartment.  We have about a 20 minute walk to campus everyday, which isn't ideal since the people in the dorms live in the same building that we have class in but I'm glad I'm in an apartment.  I'll have to post pictures soon because it's pretty awesome.  We had about 30 minutes to get settled into our apartment before they took us to the store to get things for our apartment.  When we got back from shopping a bunch of us went out to dinner got hot pot.  Chengdu is known for hot pot and spicy food.  Hot pot is essentially a giant pot (sort of like fondue) where you cook all your food.  It's insanely spicy though and we got the mildest one.  My lips were burning for quite a while.  I'm going to have a hard time getting used to the spicy food.
     The next day we had orientation at 9am.  I was pretty tired and still didn't feel like I have caught up on sleep and adjusted to the time change yet but I think they are trying to keep us busy so nobody gets bored or homesick.  We had orientation at a hotel during the morning and then in the afternoon they sent us on a scavenger hunt.  My group's task was to ride the bus and go find IKEA.  We ended up shopping for a little while.  When we got home that night my roommate Lauren found a mouse/rat (still not sure which one) in her room!!  They told us at orientation not to leave our windows open because mice get in but we had already left the window open.  The mouse was on her window sill so I got a broom and knocked it down and Lauren tried to catch it.  It was ridiculously fast and managed to get inside her drawer and we lost it for a while.  Eventually we got it out we stood on the bed screaming and trying to hit it with a broom.  After what seemed like forever Lauren managed to kill it with the broom.  There is now blood on her floor and she ended up sleeping in another room last night.  We're kind of traumatized by the whole situation.  Then today we found a mouse had eaten through our bread, cereal and a tomato.  We bought traps today so hopefully they work.
    Today was the first day of class.  I have Chinese 3 days a week for 3 hours each day.  I only had Chinese today and it went surprisingly well.  My teacher is awesome and I couldn't believe how much Chinese I understood!  After class a big group of us went to Carrefour, which is a big supermarket.  We picked up a bunch of things we needed for our apartment and I was able to get a Chinese phone.  I'm exhausted and hoping to catch up on sleep later this week but I'm really liking Chengdu!  It's a cool city and a lot nicer than I was expecting!