Dinner with all of the students

May 27, 2007 Sunday

Chuck went to work and I checked my email. Suddenly an ENORMOUS BUG landed on my shirt pocket. I tried shaking the shirt – still there. I’m going “eh, eh, eh” in a panic. Walked to the living room, still eh, ehing, bug still there. Brushed it off with the fly swatter and smacked it good.

Learned later that the children like to play with these bugs and that they have hooks on their feet, so it was unable to get loose from my shirt. It was awhile before my heart started beating normally again.

Chuck and I went to Carrefour for lunch and some last minute shopping. The food court has an interesting system. There is a central cashier. You buy a smart card. This took awhile for us to understand. A young guy showed us his and took us to the place to get the card. One problem – we didn’t know how much our food was going to cost. We guessed, went back with our card and ordered some dumplings. Then we had 8¥ left. Chuck went and bought a large beer. We now have a card with 2¥. I will give it to the cleaning lady.

I had collected all the Carrefour slips I could find, so after buying, tried my luck with the game again. I won a face cloth! The young guys who hadn’t been able to get any baskets were quite surprised. (4 flights)

Picked up Chuck’s shirts and found some paper to wrap gifts. We are giving Jian, Hongfang and Xiaolian UCLA shirts. (4 flights)

We took the group out to the hot pot restaurant for a last good bye. I think that they are all getting A’s. They came to the lectures, did the problems and had dinner with us. Sounds fair to me.

These are the future physicists of China. Many of them will be coming to the US for grad school.

(4 flights) 12 flights.