Why I Have Hotpot Hair.

Friday 7 March, 2014 

¥3.00      Breakfast (Uni Restaurant)
¥17.00    Fruit (Blueberries 14, Bananas 3)
¥45.00    Lunch (Chicken Parma @ Vineyard)
¥200.00  Tutoring
¥30.00    Dinner (Hotpot)
¥130.00  Walmart

Saturday 8 March, 2014 
¥5.00      Breakfast (Hand-held pancake)
¥32.00    Lunch (Uni Restaurant)
¥25.00    Dinner (Korean Food)
¥15.00    Pudding (Green tea and red bean)

Total: ¥502.00 ($95.60)

Weekly Total: ¥843.80 ($160.70)

Total Spend: ¥5615.00 ($1069.50 AUD)

- - -

Mm.. my hair smells like hotpot again.

I've had a pretty tame Friday and Saturday this week. We were supposed to go out late for Karaoke on Friday, but I started to feel a bit unwell so decided to focus on recovering instead.

One of the best food options around Hangzhou is hotpot (a shared eating activity where you throw food into a pot and eat it as it cooks). The only issue with eating hotpot is I have to deal with meaty smelly hair. It's quite a distracting smell when you're trying to sleep.

Hotpot for 7. Waiting for the goodies to put inside.

So it looks like bread but apparently you can't eat it like bread? You have to chuck it in the hotpot first so it becomes a soggy mess. But it's made of flour.. in cantonese it's called mian gun. I don't know how to explain it in English, sorry!

Glorious meat! We haven't been eating enough meat here so I'm worried about my iron levels..

One of the highlights of this hotpot place is that you can make your own sauces. There is a sauce station with 30 different condiments that you can mix and match to your own taste.

Today a few of us went to the badminton courts around 10am, but they were already all full. I decided to practise my Chinese and ask some of the people on the court when they were planning to finish, but most of them said around 12pm (Well I'm pretty sure that's what they said because I didn't really get it). One nice group asked if I wanted to join them, and then one guy gave up his place for me to play. I played with them for about 1.5 hours, there were some really good players so it was nice to get a feel of what a good game should be like! I've become totally addicted to badminton now, it gives me a better workout than running. (Don't worry, the guy who gave up his place ended up playing with his other friends, and I even played against him too for a little bit)

Full courts early in the morning. Badminton is a really popular spt here!

At around 11:30am, the courts start emptying out. 11:30-1:00pm is the quiet time I would say - actually lunch and dinner time is the best if you want to secure a court.

After lunch, I decided to study until dinner time - that's 4 hours of studying on a Saturday while on study exchange!! What is this! 

At dinner, there was an interesting observation made that our group came to China with different motives - the girls came here to study, while the guys were here to party and have fun. (They were complaining that this was their first time not going out on a Saturday night, etc, etc.) We've also been getting into really deep conversations - yesterday it was about homosexuality, and today it was about religion and love (one of my friends here has really strict requirements when looking for a partner). One of the boys said they have never really truly experienced "falling in love" and then continued to describe what he thought 'falling in love' would be like, and I felt a bit overwhelmed because it was as if he was describing my experience with falling in love, and I started to miss my boyfriend a lot. I had to ask him to stop..!

Today we also discovered this pudding place next to uni. It's super delicious and I'm going to spend my life savings here.

Anyway, I thought I had escaped the hotpot hair situation because I had a nice long shower after badminton this morning. But we had dinner at a Korean BBQ place today.

Sooooo does anyone know if hair deodorisers exist?