Tuesday (March 10)

I went to Chinese class in the morning to which only five (David, Jeremy, Mike, Scott and I) out of the nine students showed up. We did some review and after class, Jeremy, Marit, Bjoernar and I had Wentao book our flight tickets to Guilin. The four of us then went to lunch by the school. I was walking with Jeremy, who was stopped by the cops carrying guns and asked where he was going. The reason there were so many cops around our school is because it's right next to a Tibetan area. Around this time last year (from what I've heard), Tibetans peacefully protested and the Chinese government retaliated which gradually turned more and more violent. As a result, this year the Chinese police surrounded Tibetan areas and closed Tibet and Tibetan areas. No foreigners are allowed to travel to these areas. We foreigners could only walk through the Tibetan street by our school if we showed them our passports. Anyways, Jeremy told the cops that we were going to eat at the restaurant around the corner and they let us through. After eating dumplings, Jeremy and I walked to the bank to withdraw money to pay for the plane tickets. I took the bus back home and returned to school around 3 p.m. for Economy class, which was fairly boring since our teacher was going over the gap between rural and urban China. I already know about this and the information was pretty basic, so I wasn't too interested in the class. On our way back to the apartments, Wesley, Scott and I went to dinner. I later bought a phone card, went home and blogged for the rest of the night.