They’re laying overtime right now, for Easter.

Okay, before I begin; I meant to mention this in the last post but forgot – thank you to everyone who voted for me in the iX13 competition! I came 35th overall (I think there were about 200 entrants?) so yeah, that’s awesome! 😀 You can see a list of the top 100 and a map of where they are here; it’s really quite interesting.

Anyway, this is just a short post about what I did last weekend (the 30th and 31st March), because, for a change, I actually went out and did something. Yay!

So on Saturday, I got up early and met friends to go to Wangfujing (王府井), mainly because I’d heard they had a really good bookstore there.

Good is kind of an understatement.

I bought seven books, and all for less than 200rmb (about £20). They’re either in Chinese or they’re Chinese/English (to teach people English, but I just use them the other way) and I’m so excited. I’ve got the first Harry Potter and the first Lord of the Rings in there (along with Matilda, Charlotte’s Web, The Secret Garden…); my only issue is, once I’ve bought the whole bookstore, how on earth am I going to cart it home?

After we’d been to the bookstore (and then to Dairy Queen for milkshakes, because that’s a thing that exists here), we went to have a look at the famous Wangfujing food street – aka the place where you can eat scorpions!

The tiny scorpions in that last picture? Still twitching away on their sticks when you look at them! I do plan to try one at some point because, hey, why not? (Also that’s on the internet now, so I think I have to…) But yes, there’ll be pictures. I’ve got to go back and buy more books, anyway ;).

Sunday was, of course, Easter – and the end of Lent, yay! I gave up chocolate, crisps and ‘full fat’ (i.e. not diet or zero) fizzy drinks this year so this was my Easter morning feast:

Yummmmmmmm. I brought the creme eggs with me from the UK but there is a surprising amount of chocolate available here (which I didn’t really notice last time). For Easter dinner, we went to the Muslim restaurant on campus which was both delicious (I had some Thai chicken) and cheap.

I went on Skype earlier that day and my mum told me she’d sent me a parcel, which I didn’t manage to get until today – but that was for Easter too (though it was a little worse for wear when I finally got my hands on it):

Mmmmmm Lindt. There’s one lone Lindt bunny on my shelf now, and he’s coming with me to Xi’an tomorrow. Well. To the train.

Hm, that’s about it – I did say it would be short. I head off for Xi’an at 12.30 tomorrow (and get there at about 05.00 Thursday, yay! -_-), so I’ll write something about that this weekend.

Until then, then! 🙂