Life is good.

When you're living in China, sometimes you just want a little homestyle television to keep you company, fill your apartment with the language you're familiar with.

So I went out to the bar a week and a half ago, and some Chinese guy got his nose broken on my pants.

So this is my street. I live on this street, and I like living on this street.

After a wonderful trip back to the US to see my family and friends, it was back to Beijing for me yesterday - and this flight just seems to get easier and easier the more I do it.

So this past week at UIBE was an interesting sort of week. After an in-class confrontation with a teacher whose teaching style is, well, provincial, to say the least, things conflagrated into an epic pissing contest, which appears to have ended in a draw, with both concerned parties agreeing (on paper) to delivery formal apologies in class Monday. I can't wait.

I took that as a cue, though, to take some time off from Beijing. It's not that I don't love the city - I live, breathe, eat and sleep Beijing, it's just that after you've been living there for a while, you have a tendency to forget that the rest of the world really exists. Unfortunately, that includes my girlfriend, who lives in the rest of the world.

For the low, low price of 1600 RMB, though, I was able to snag a flight on Shandong Airlines and arrived last night in Qingdao (home of the famous Tsingdao Beer), where my girlfriend greeted me with tasty kim chee udon noodles and some much-needed face time. Now I'm sitting here at the Beihai Hotel in downtown Qingdao, enjoying nearly unrestricted internet access for the first time in months - my apartment's internet access seems to block out an arbitrary 30% of the internet at any given moment, and so I'm using this moment to catch up on some much needed Facebook and Myspace networking.

Later in the afternoon I'll drag my tired old ass down to the ocean and see if I can't get my toes wet - without getting sick. I've already got a suspicious sore throat, and we all know where that's probably headed...

The first thing you learn about China is that it's not safe to drink the tap water. Everything from Ghiardia to flat out pollution is in there, and boiling the tap water first doesn't really put you in the clear - the pollutants stay in the water; you can even see hard water stains on the pot you've boiled it in.

So, short of hiking it down to the corner store every day for a 3 kuai two-liter bottle of water, how are you supposed to stay hydrated?

The answer is water coolers. They're incredibly cheap here in China - I bought my combination water cooler / heater for around 40 Yuan - six American dollars or so. Now keep in mind, neither the heating nor cooling elements work in my Chinese water cooler, but that's not what's important - my cooler holds one gigantic 18.2 liter jug of water, and that can last for quite a long time.

Many foreigners living and studying in China don't have such a jug - it's a language barrier. Even if you can manage to buy the water cooler, you've still got to find a local water distributor in your neighborhood, and then you've got to manage to tell him what you want and where you live.
Luckily for me, my pathetic Chinese was up to the task. I asked my Xiao Mai Bu (corner store) lady where to find the water guy, then went out looking for him every afternoon until I found him one afternoon refilling his pedal cart with water jugs.

After a quick conversation I'd managed to tell him that I wanted water, and learned how to say the word "jug" - "Dong," and an hour later he arrived at my place with 18.2 sweet, sweet liters of water for the low cost of 15 Kuai - about two dollars.

Mine ran out this morning while I was trying to make coffee. Badness. I pulled out my cell phone, dialed up water guy, and told him I'm the foreigner in building 25.

This is the easiest way to make Chinese people know who you are when you're living in China. Don't beat around the bush. Don't tell him "I"m that guy you met by the back gate." Just tell him, "I'm the foreigner." You can get food, water, just about everything you need delivered like this. I can't imagine how Chinese people get things delivered - "Hey, I'm the guy with the black hair."

Point is, less than ten minutes later, I had 18.2 liters of drinkable water in my apartment again, and I didn't even have to leave the house - the weather in Beijing is terrifying outside today, rainy and foggy and smoggy all at the same time.

But no matter - thanks to a smattering of Chinese ability and the foresight of getting water guy's cell phone number, I'm drinking hot coffee in China right now and loving every second of it.

Studying in China has been an incredibly positive experience for me so far - but of course, I haven't gotten any marks yet. My biggest fears, though, that I would be taught in the traditional Chinese post-secondary style (mainly, little class participation, mostly rote memorization and testing, heavy cheating, etc.), have been squashed - UIBE, as it turns out, is a very open-minded and forward-thinking school.

The fact that I even have the opportunity to gain a degree in International Business, taught in English in a country like China is mind-blowing. But the fact that I actually seem to be doing pretty well in the program makes me really excited.

See, I'm not really doing this the way that most of the other students are. Most of the people here are trying to finish their Masters' Degree in one year and then go off somewhere else; I'm planning this out for a slow burn, two years, so that I can get things right. I have the opportunity to have an internship with a Chinese company, and I'll be writing a Graduate thesis - pretty exciting stuff for me.

So far things are going well - I had my midterm exam this past monday for my Fundamentals of Economics in International Business course, for which I studied an entire week or so, catching up on the old reading, highlighting, and doing all sorts of practice problems which didn't show up on the exam. No matter. I know I got one question wrong, but the rest of them seem in pretty good shape.

My International Business Relationships class continues to be exciting and interesting, while simultaneously requiring me to do very little work. Beyond the reading, our only other assignment has been to write a midterm essay, which is due next week - I'm starting it soon.

And my stats class - boy, that one's exciting. No, seriously, I'm not joking - my Business Statistics class has taught me a crapload of information in a very short time - and the teacher says it's a pretty slow book, which blows my mind. I'm keeping up on the homework (have some to do tonight) and there apparently isn't a final - great news for me.

I spend most of my weekly worktime preparing to teach my Thursday class - something I won't be doing next semester. It's been rewarding but I need to take more classes and focus on getting my degree finished.

In general, though, the classes are nice - all of the teachers speak pretty good English, although one of the teachers doesn't speak anything but bollocks with his English. Still, though, the accents aren't bad, and the IGPIB kids are treated really well here.

Exciting upcoming news: I've got an on-site visit with Lenovo next week and another with Hyundai motors the week after - I have to remind myself to shave...

Beijing doesn't really have a long autumn - it's one of the shortest in China, due to it's unique geographical location in China's northeast, and that means that around the time that the leaves are turning orange back home, the Mongolian winds start blowing from the north.

That means that it gets cold here in Beijing pretty quickly. Luckily for all of us, the government provides free heating to every citizen - every apartment building is equipped with some form of communal heating, typically radiant. The problem is that the free government heating doesn't come on until November 15th, which is around the time that it begins to become necessary for survival.

However, this isn't my first time experiencing China's cold autumns. My time living in Ha'erbin, in China's far-flung Heilongjiang province, has left me hardened to the moderately cold weather. And I'm taking precautions.

• Autumn Gloves for Bike Riding: 9.9 RMB
• Fuzzy Slippers with Hard Rubber Soles: 20 RMB
• Vodka to Take the Edge Off: 10 RMB
• And, of course, my spiderman thermal underwear: Priceless

I'm thinking that this winter is going to be fine - as the weather gets colder, I'll just keep buying progressively more clothing. I wish there was something I could do about the tile floors in this place, but there's something you all have to understand about China: there isn't a lick of carpeting in this entire country, unless you count that fake-antique rug crap they sell in the states. No, they consider carpets to be worse than unnecessary - having lived with tile floors for so long, Chinese people understand how much dust and crap really accumulates on the floor, and hiding it in a carpet the way we foreigners do just doesn't work for them.

I'll bite. I just wish my floor didn't radiate so much cold - when I stand up, my head's in a nice, balmy climate, but my feet are dying down here - well, actually, now that I've got my fuzzy slippers (with hardened rubber soles so I can wear them in the bathroom) things are doing much better down in foot country.