Welcome back, you're fat.

You have to love how blunt Chinese people are. After three and a half months of eating Chinese food and exercising consistently, I was lean and mean upon returning to the states. But, after my touch'em all tour of America's fast food establishments, a decline in exercise, and a generally sedentary lifestyle, I had gained around 10 lbs since I got back. Naturally, the first thing all my old teachers and friends said upon seeing me was, "you got fat!" "Look at your face, look at how fat you are!" None of this was done out of malice but just to cajole me a bit. Like I said, they are a blunt people.

After the teasing was over it was great to catch up with my old teachers and friends, and, of course, to eat my favorite Chinese foods that I had been missing. Because of our debacle in Hong Kong, we only had a day to adjust an prepare for our first week of classes.

Our classes are small group style classes, typically two or three students to one teacher. The vast majority of our group had never studied before so the five of them were lumped into the beginner class. Three others had studied some, but not a lot, so they were placed at intermediate level. Myself, and Nate, have both studied for upwards of two years (on and off) so we were at the highest level of our group.

We took twenty hours a week of classes. Our Mandarin courses were every day from 820am-1230pm. They were two, two hour classes with one ten minute break in the middle. It was grueling but useful. This time, I wasn't able to get my two professors from last fall so I got three new professors to study with.

The first is a man in his late thirties by the name of Clock. By appearance he is tall by Chinese standards but very lean. He has long flowing black hair and usually wears long sleeve plaid shirts (even with the sweltering summer heat, which is nuts).

Clock by many rubrics is one of the most interesting people you will ever meet. He is the lead singer of a Chinese hard rock band, a very spiritual Daoist, and has some very interesting stories regarding his misspent youth. I loved having class with Clock because we would often go off on tangents and forget all about the text book and discuss anything from Ukraine and Syria to how to properly fix China's education system.

My other professors, Catherine and Zie (pronounced like the letter "Z") were both female and both very good teachers. I was pleasantly surprised with Zie as she was new to CLI and has less teaching experience than most of the other teachers. Her classes were also very interesting. For our final class, she organized a series of debates for Nate, herself, and I to compete in. The debates were: whether it's more important to get married for money or love, whether American food was better than Chinese food (not much progress was made by either side in that one) and whether English is a more difficult language than Chinese (it is).

All in all I was very pleased with all of my professors and progress this time around. I was able to study an entire book of Chinese, containing 10 chapters and about 400 new characters. Remembering them will take a little work though...