Today is the last day of the New Year Festival, called the Lantern Festival (Yuan2xiao1jie2). This means the last day of fireworks (finally!) and eating tang1yuan2, which are small dumplings made of sticky rice and filled with sweet bean curd and served in warm water. They are fairly slimy, but still quite good. Besides the holiday nothing really exciting has happened recently. The weather has been fairly good, so on Saturday I ventured outside to study. There is a very small "park" on the campus of the university (right now it's mostly dead grass and extremely dry soil, but hopefully when spring comes it might turn green) where people (usually elderly people) gather in the morning to do exercises. When I went, there were a few mothers with their typically over bundled up babies waddling around. The temperature got close to 60 degrees Fahrenheit which was quite comfortable and there was almost no pollution so the sun was shining strongly. These past few days, the weather has also been pretty warm, but the air is so hazy it feels unclean to breathe. My roommate and I also found a clothing store that sells fairly normal clothing (i.e. not too many extra frills and sparkles and bows and lace...) and is also very cheap. I bought two shirts for $2 each.
On Saturday night a bunch of us went to a "western restaurant" called Annie's. I ordered vegetable pizza which was really good after so much Chinese food. Also, they gave us large glasses (!) with cold water (!) and we got to use a fork and knife. Although it did cost about three times as much as a regular Chinese meal. mmmmm.

Well, since yesterday, something exciting did happen. Because of the copious amounts of fireworks last night, a skyscraper very close to the University caught fire. All 44 stories were burning, but the building did not collapse. It was also very near the new CCTV building, but the CCTV building was not damaged. Even after the building started burning (30 foot flames, lots and lots of smoke, etc.) people still kept setting off fireworks.