New Year Adventures of Panda Girl

My new favorite hat:

You might think this looks silly, but animal hats are all the fashion here. I'm so wearing it when I go to the U.S. in February to see my grandma; she is going to crack up when she sees it, and I can't wait. It's a great hat, btw, it feels like you're wearing a blanket on your head. I've started wearing it to bed to keep warm.

New Year's Eve turned out to be much more fun than I anticipated. My friend T. organized a trip up a mountain to ring in the new year, but as I told him, not only do I not climb mountains in the dark in the dead of winter, I don't even pretend I want to. So instead I went to my friend V.'s house. V. is awesome, because A: he is from the South, so we speak the same social language, and B: he loves brie and baguettes, tomato salad and nutella as much as I do. We ate these yummy things for dinner, then went downtown to meet up with a few friends. We watched fireworks and rang in the New Year at midnight in a beer garden with other revelers, then went into a club and danced the night away. Our mountain friends came down off the mountain to join us, so it was a big all-night lovefest. What a great way to ring in the new year! Here's a picture of me trying to eat J.'s nutella. As you can see by his face, he did not think this was as funny as I did.

My New Year's Day weekend trip was so interesting! And so Chinese. I'll tell more about in the coming days, but it ended up being just me, the director of the Foreign Affairs Office, and his whole extended family. I was honored he asked me to spend the weekend with his family. They were wonderfully hospitable to me, and made me feel very welcome. I was on pins and needles the whole weekend, making sure I didn't do something to offend anyone. (There is a strict pecking order in Chinese families. I'll talk more about this later, too.) My director's nieces were very cute, and took a liking to me. They always wanted to sit next to me and hold my hand. Here's a picture of us in the backseat of the car:

And here's a picture of part of the group in a city called DuJiangYan, a World Heritage Site located near Chengdu, Sichuan province. At this place, they started using dams and irrigation 2,600 years ago, and the same system is still used today. Pretty neat:

I'll post some more pictures tomorrow, and give more details about my trip. Hope you all had a great New Year!