A Day at Jackson Hole

My professor invited the entire lab to his weekend home near Beijing today for a barbeque.  He has a flat near campus that he lives at with his family during the week, but they recently bought this American style house in a neighborhood called "Jackson Hole."  It is designed by a Western American designer and actually looks like a suburb in Wyoming might look.  Complete with Indian statues and Chinese guards wearing cowboy hats.  It was pretty funny.

We went for a little hike in the hills, and there were a lot of pretty big rocks.  I think it's the first place I've been in China where you can't see any trash lying around.  We did the Chinese version of BBQ, where meat is put on skewers are barbequed with some delicious seasonings loaded with MSG.  It was so good.  I finally got a chance to get to know my labmates better, which was fun.  They are all very funny and generally very willing to tolerate my sometimes-disjointed Chinese.  When I came to China, I could not understand much of what people said, but we spoke almost all Chinese today and I probably got about 80% of it, which feels awesome. And I have two more months.  

If you went to fifth grade in my era, you probably played Mafia, and we played it for about 2 hours in Chinese which was quite funny.