Coercion

You didn't like my last post.
I see. I thought it was really neat!
Well.
Ok.
So I went to the U.S. and started a master's program in TESOL (Teaching English to speakers of other languages)

I made new friends!
I got to see my mommy and daddy and my cousins and aunty and uncle. I packed my tummy full of tasty Mexican food and dragged my family to the beach as often as I could and ate some tasty bubblegum ice cream.

In all honesty, it's been really tough to come back to China. I am more homesick now than I have been all year. Wow, that sounds pretty dramatic. I hate being melodramatic in my blog posts!
There have been good things too. I'm in Chengdu for the next two weeks for our annual summer language program.

We are studying hard!
We had an outing to see the pandas again and a really cool museum dedicated to the 三星堆 (san xing dui or literally the 3 star mounds)--an excavation site that turned up lots of stuff which is carbon-dated to the 11-12th century BC! This bronze age civilization is thus a contemporary of the Shang dynasty which is thought to be the second Chinese dynasty. The 三星堆 civilization is quite mysterious as neither myth nor historical record refer to it (I'm using Wikipedia as my source). But they sure had some sweet masks with googly pupils! Check it out!