I spent the afternoon shopping in Xidan with Katia. First we did some banking stuff (the central Bank of China is quite impressive in and of itself), then we went to eat at one of the many food courts in the area. We were looking for a specific food court Katia had seen before, but we never found it.

Katia bought a t-shirt, a bag, and socks, and she was ready to buy more, making me feel guilty for not having bought anything. We went to this huge bookstore and looked at the selection of learn-Chinese books. Katia got a CD-Rom-type thing, plus a book of Chinese songs, but upon closer inspection (in her dorm room), she realised what crap it was. The CD-Rom is useless because the explanations for very basic words (numbers and "me," "you," "it") are all in Chinese, which makes it very difficult to understand... And her book of songs, well, she already knows all the grammar in it, and in fact, they're not even songs at all...not very useful.

I got a good textbook, written by a French author, Belassen. It's supposed to be the best one around. They didn't have the accompanying CD though, which is very unfortunate. Katia's going to see if she can't burn hers (Gaetan is borrowing her book + CD for the moment) so that both Gaetan and I can use it. We went down and back up three flights of stairs and we asked about a million different people a million times where we could find the CD - "mayo" is all they answered ("We don't have it."). Very frustrating. We even went to the CD (media) section and found the place for learning Chinese cassettes and CDs, but my specific CD for my specific textbook wasn't there...

This evening we went out for dinner - there were ten of us. Five French and five Chinese students all studying French. It was good fun.

And now I'm exhausted. I've got class tomorrow but I get to sleep in until 8:30 AM. Yay!

The picture is of a guy in Xidan in the typical Chinese stance: the squat. I thought it was pretty funny that he was in the middle of a patch of grass, squatting on a manhole, talking on his phone. Had to take a picture. :)