火锅，谢谢你！还是，是我的免疫系统？

I think that hot pot did me in. By yesterday morning I felt the same way I felt the morning after arriving in Chengdu, right before I got sick for a week. However, yesterday was too important to worry about such trifles as personal health.

Around noon I rode my bike in the general direction of the free market that Bob took me to. Instead of finding it, though, I bought the vegetables I needed at a little vegetable shop on a quiet street somewhere. It was the only shop I passed that didn't have dead animals hanging in the doorway. For six tomatoes, three onions, four peppers, and a bunch of cilantro, I paid about $1.50.

In the evening I had an apartment-warming party of sorts. I finally made the burritos, but they were only a moderate success. The avocados weren't ripe yet, and after soaking overnight and cooking for five hours the black beans were still hard in the middle. I don't know what's wrong with them (or with me). But the Spanish rice was fine, and the grilled peppers and onions were good. And one of my friends, Sharon, brought some sweet potatoes. I don't really have enough furniture yet, but by pulling together my three chairs, my footstool, and the couch, we had enough seats for everybody. It was great to finally have guests, and it made my apartment feel more like a living place.

It was only after everybody left that the virus really hit me. But I went to bed with the heater on full blast, and, amazingly, this morning I felt fine. This was a miracle, because today I had meetings with two English students (one for the first time). The cold has started to come back a little bit tonight, but it's not nearly as bad as it was last night.

I biked across campus several times today. Most of the leaves don't change colors here, but there are some streets lined with beautiful yellow ginkgo trees. There is actually one street like that right behind my apartment, and throughout the day it's crowded with little groups of people taking pictures of each other in front of the changing leaves.

The campus of Sichuan University is big. Due to some strange feature of the street plan, the cardinal directions seem to rearrange themselves at will. More than once I have had my sense of direction completely fooled. Because campus is too large to walk in a reasonable amount of time, and because bike theft is so common, pedicab drivers congregate at the main gates. They can bring you anywhere on campus for about 25 cents.

There is a degree of contrast at SU that isn't found on any of the campuses I have seen in the U.S. One street has a large, modern stadium towering over a well-groomed lawn. The next street over consists of old brick dormitories, and laundry lines stretched between the trees in the little park on the corner. On another street, one of these buildings has been partially demolished, and four chickens are picking over one of the rubble heaps. Nearby there is a bank and a photography studio. Two streets farther there is a field covered in trash. Finally you come to the eastern gate, where the sidewalk is broken in front of a sparkling new high-rise community, and literally right next door is another lot filled with rubble and burning trash. Some people are sitting in the lot behind a table selling vegetables.