Tianjin strikes again

Well, Tianjin has brought another man down. Or maybe it has just brought the same man (me) down . . . again. I have spent most of the weekend at home with another cold. I really don't seem to have any defenses against Chinese germs and viruses, despite my best efforts to drink lots of water, eat lots of vitamin-C rich fruit, get plenty of rest, and take my multi-vitamin every day (or at least most days).

The bad news is that I really needed to spend this weekend studying diligently, because on Tuesday I have my third-quarter test. With this cold, I haven't felt much up to that task. I pretended to study for a couple of hours last night, while actually watching episodes of House, M.D. Ben bought four seasons of the show on DVD at the main market on Nankai campus a few weeks ago, and it has provided hours of mindless, American entertainment. Needless to say, lacksidasically scrawling characters while listening to House's sarcastic retorts is not the ideal approach to studying.

The good news is that, while I've been under the weather, I have had plenty of time to "do research" for our upcoming travels. Both Ben and I have about two months off for winter holiday, almost all of January, and all of February. We plan to spend some time with our friend Jen K., who will be here for a couple weeks in January, and then we want to spend two or three weeks traveling with one of my classmates, seeing (some of) the sights of China. We know we want to go to Shanghai and Xi'an, home of the terra-cotta warriors. I really want to go to Guilin to see some of the famous mountainous landscape, although I've heard it can be kind of a tourist trap. We would also love to go to Hong Kong. We just need to figure out where else we want to go, and how long we can afford to travel, both in terms of time, and in terms of money. (It will be vacation time, but Ben has some serious PhD work he needs to attend to during the holiday.) I envision this trip being a fairly open-ended one--we might have a general idea of where we want to go, but not necessarily a set-in-stone plan for how long we may stay in each place. All I know is I want to go south--it's getting far too cold in Tianjin to want to spend an entire winter here!

In the meantime, it's time for me to buckle down with my kleenexes and textbooks (and no House in the background) and get ready for this test. The next few weeks are going to be pretty intense study-wise, between this upcoming test on Tuesday, and my final exams coming up in just a month. I'm just hoping Tianjin won't throw any more monster germs my way.