Knick knacks, tons of snacks, then I'm going home...

So I try to think of creative titles for my blogs, but I don't know if its working out. So knick knacks... ...
This afternoon after class Laura, Deborah, Matt, and I rode our bikes across town to a hostel to buy tickets for Mid-Autumn Festival/National Day break coming up this week. Laura, Matt, and I are going on a Yangtze River cruise to the Three Gorges Dam. Deborah came along because the hostel is located in a really cool area called the Tibetan District that has a little touristy shopping district that's inside/associated with an old temple, so after we made our reservations we walked around a looked at everything. This is a picture of the Starbucks inside (weird, huh?) and kind of what the street looked like. There were all sorts of little shops. The picture on the left is of a guy making candy animals. He heats of sugar until it melts and then waits until it is exactly the right consistency and takes a ball and blows into it and shapes and animal out of sugar. It's like balloon animals, but way cooler. The one he is making now is a Tiger. The other picture is of paper-cuts. They are very detailed and beautiful. The next picture is of another stand that had shadow puppets. They are made out of tanned leather and painted and then (the real ones) are used behind a screen to act out a shadow puppet show. This is a store that sold all sorts of weird smoking related things. These are all cigarette cases that in reality look like band-aid containers with different little pictures on them. Lots of them were of Mao. They also had old carved pipes and all sorts of things that I didn't even know what they were. The next picture on the left is on Matthew playing a game similar to the shot the star out game, except instead of a BB gun you have a wooden cross bow and shoot little wooden arrows and a straw thing with a black patch in the center. I think you have to get all the arrows in the black, but I'm not sure. Then we went to a shop where they were making silk. This is them stretching the fiber bundles to make it flat and stretched out. Then they wait for it to dry and spread it on this table. That's all we got to see, so I don't know what they do after that but somehow it turns into silk. Chengdu is famous for its silk, which I did not know until I got here. Especially its painted silk. The last shop I have pictures of is a shop where you can get your name carved into rock as a seal. It's very common to have and use these in China. They come in all shapes and sizes and some of them have little carvings on the top too. If you get a carving on the top it is usually the animal of your birth year. I decided to get one carved with my Chinese name in it. I picked out a smooth grey stone that I liked and the guy carved my name for me. It was amazing to watch. The precision he got carving into stone was really good and Deborah (who has had one made before) said his craftsmanship was really good. It comes in a little box and I also bought red clay, which is what you use to stamp. That also comes in a little box. The carving is beautiful and I like it alot. When I stamp something, I'll put it up here so you guys can see what it looks like. He can write my name way better than I can. There were lots of other little shops with more touristy wall hangings and cloths and little figurines and jewelry and things.

Tons of snacks... ...
At 6pm we went back to school because the Overseas Education School was giving us a free banquet in honor of China's 57th National Day. The President made a speech and then there was a free buffet afterwards. The speech was short, in keeping with almost all Chinese speeches, but the President did say a few interesting things about trying to make Chuan Da a international university. Right now there are about 900 international students (9% of Chuan Da's total student body) who represent something like 47 different countries. It was pretty cool. I wanted to stick around and meet some of the International students that I don't see in class, but I have a test tomorrow so I had to go home to study (then I'm going home... ...). The food was good, but not excellent. But it was free and since I've been in Sichuan, the food capitol of China at least, I know my standards have gotten alot higher. We did get to try alot of different new things though, so that was fun. We also tried a different kind of moon cake. The kind with the egg yoke that we had last night is the most traditional kind, but because no one likes those they have made other kinds. I tried one that had dried fruit in it that tasted kind of like an energy bar and one with nuts in it that was my favorite. They were MUCH better than the egg ones.