Lunch

Remember the bananas I received as a thank-you gift for participating in the French Department's English Corner (maybe I should explain: English Corner is a classroom where students - in this case from the French Department - come together to practice their English; they choose a topic - let's say campus life - and sometimes get into smaller groups to discuss the topic; it's totally voluntary and organised by the students themselves)? Well, they stayed in my fridge for a good five days before they really started to stink they were so ripe. I didn't throw them away quickly enough - whatever I put in my fridge continues to this day (a week later) to taste like bananas. Today I'm eating banana-tinged young joe chow fan (fried rice).

You must be so sick of looking at pictures of the same ol' people! Maybe you know them by heart now (L to R): Loic (French teacher), Gaetan and Katia (studying Economics). I noticed them outside the boys' dormitory by chance at lunch today coming home from class. The smal campus store is to the left of Loic's head and you can also see a bulletin board behind the three of them. I think the board has pictures and notices about the history of the campus.
The three of them with the campus' recreational facilities' in the background. You can almost make out the letters BISU on the grandstand (Beijing International Studies University).
A student from my 8-10 AM class who wanted to take a picture - her friend took the picture using her cell phone.

When someone gives you a compliment you're supposed to say "Guo jian" - not so nice. One of my colleagues with whom I had lunch with last Friday told me that when she was a girl she used to succeed a lot in school but that her mother would always tell her friends that her daughter wasn't intelligent - it was the Chinese way - and now this colleague can only see the bad side of things, she's quite pessimistic even when things look good. She even said she has to live with the fact that her husband (whom she married last year) isn't as good-looking as she had thought! He's fat! She doesn't like his looks! I thought it was quite funny of her to tell me so...