New Friends

A couple of days ago, my new roommate, Rodrigo, returned from Beijing. Last night was his birthday, so a bunch of us went for dinner. Everyone seems really nice, and it was a great chance to practise Chinese and try some new foods, like "petrified egg"- yes it is actually very old, green egg that tastes a little sour, but not bad. You eat it with tofu. Its kind of funny, I thought I was ok at eating with chopsticks before, and now I know I am ok- and just ok. I don't know how people eat things like mushy and crumbly tofu with chopsticks, its pretty hard! Anyway, here we have, clockwise, Matt (Oil Painting/ USA/Taiwan/HongKong), Shaddy (Oil Painting/ Dom. Rep.), me (GBR/USA), Andre (Chinese Language/Russia), Rodrigo (Brasil/Chinese language/ Graphic Design), Kaoli (Chinese Painting/ Japan), Jacob (Chinese Painting USA) (Maname (Japan), Micky (Jap.), Fuji (Jap./Printmaking). Everyone is at different levels of Chinese and study. I have to say that is nice being around people from all over, learning to communicate, partly because you have to be kind of nice- and by that I mean that there is not so much sarcasm or sardonic-ness if that makes sense (?). I will probably be the one who ends up breaking away into a-hole-dom. Well, I think I can be polite enough and just tone down the darker pieces of humor for the foreign appetites, right? Anyway I genuinely like everyone I have met so far, which is awesome and maybe a little surprising even.
Well, this isn't the greatest picture, but anyway, we all know how much I hate to sit there while each person takes a pic of the group with their own camera, so I didn't try to take more than one.