May == Lizhi ?!

It's May! And the weather is great! 

On the warm side, which means that people on the track are taking extra measures to preserve their fair skin. 

This man gave me thumbs up for doing abs 

I made 6 loaves of challah for the other study abroad students!

I went running to the lake 

At the top of a hill I was running up and down, I met a Chinese man whose English was very good, and we chatted in English and Chinese about his work. Needless to say, I abandoned my hill running to talk to him, and hike around the mountain. 

Running back, it was getting dark

We went to a night market! I got some stamps for my grandparents

We didn't know what buses were still running so we ducked into a starbucks for their wifi and saw these.

Our program organized a trip to the coast! We stayed here, in an alright hotel, I bunked up with Zella and Hangqi, as my roomie had experiment time points all weekend for some experiments : ( 

 It was nice to see the sky again! If this weekend was any sign, when I get back to the states I'll constantly exclaim about the blueness of the sky. 

We went to the old part of town, called shi po, which had some pretty terrible museums, but good sites.  

And looking towards the ocean

The next morning running, got a lot of strange looks but the air was so clean!

We took a boat to a nearby island for some sand filed not-fish scented beach time, 

So nice !

But of course there was a lot of trash, so I spent awhile picking it up before napping and eating copious amounts of PB & J. After utilizing a somewhat inefficient search methods to gather trash, being asked whether I was a local, being again asked if I was local, being told I had an "unusual spirit" and having lots of pictures taken of me, I managed to locate a trash bin(after being asked even more questions) , and after a couple loads I managed to place all the items I had found in it. I didn't take pictures of my piles, as I figure you guys can imagine, the most unexpected item I found was maybe a winter boot. There were a lot of plastic bottles. And styrofoam.  I got some oil on my hands. 

We attracted a lot of attention, especially when we played games. Those standing are strangers, who didn't want to talk to us, just wanted to watch. 

And we were headed back to shore

We went to a strange town, which used to be a set for traditional movies and tv shows. It might still be, we're not too clear on this. Anyway, people wanted to take our pictures, but this was my favorite picture.

Some dubious English.

My new favorite fruit! I'm still not 100 percent on what kind of fruit it is, but I like it. Oh! And Lizhi are almost in season, after a long time I will once again feast on my favorite fruit! But right now they are still expensive, 1 lbs is 40 kuai, about 6 dollars. So I bought 5 and shared 2 and ate three with relish. Yum. Much to look forward to!