A beautiful weekend

Hurrah for another wonderful weekend in Hangzhou! After a busy week of classes and homework we went out to celebrate a Chinese friends birthday at KTV (a karaoke place) for the evening (during which, I lost my phone!). It was a lot of fun, but we were up late and Saturday was a long day for everyone. Saturday, everyone had the opportunity to go to the National Tea Museum to drink Longjing Tea. Longjing tea cost about 3,000 yuan ($600) for ½ a kilogram and we enjoyed the tea for the entire day for free! We also watched the process of roasting the tea by hand and picked the leaves on top of a beautiful mountain. The only down-side of the trip was having thousands of pictures taken for the newspaper publicity the entire day. At the end of the long day, Mike and I went out on a nice little date at the Korean Grill we tried the weekend before. This time it was wonderful because it was only Mike and I… I didn’t have to worry about accidently eating lamb, no one was stealing our food off the grill, and we could actually talk to each other.. Another huge plus was our amazing fu wu yuan (service person). There wasn’t very much meat on the buffet, so she came up to us and said “How can you help me?” Luckily I thought she said “Would you like meat?” and I said “niu rou, (beef)” and Mike asked for some other meats. (Mike told me later she asked “How can you help me” and I thought it was funny that we still got our point across.. For the rest of our dinner she was bringing us food that wasn’t offered on the buffet, including these fresh whole fish that were really good (For those of you who know me, I don’t like fish!). At the end of the dinner I would have left her a HUGE tip, but it’s disrespectful to leave tips in China so we told her “feichang gan xie” which means super thank you (there’s not a good way to translate it, but it’s really polite).
Today has just been a lazy-ish day. I slept in until 9:00 and then Mike and I went to buy laundry soap and eat lunch. We came back to the office for a while and I studied for my Chinese test tomorrow and then we hiked up a nearby mountain (that’s why it wasn’t a lazy day). Currently I am researching our trip to Tibet in June while eating a 5 yuan (less than one USD) papaya. 