So I'm on vacation. Thank God. It couldn't have come fast enough. I made the decision to head south, back down to Guilin, where I lived when I first traveled to China in 2002.

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.

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...

So I've been working on a section of this website that lists Chinese universities that offer degree programs taught in English. It's something that I couldn't find when I was looking around last year - and after finding such a good school here in Beijing, I want to make sure that other foreigners have access to the resources.

In light of that, I've cataloged most of the Project 211 Universities here in China that offer English-language degree programs.

The list of Chinese schools offering degrees in English is here.

Questions, comments or corrections are warmly welcomed. Good luck with your studies in China!

Am I the only person in China who absolutely despises bargaining? In China, bargaining is absolutely necessary if you're buying anything outside of a department store, and I can't stand to do it - I'm terrible at it.

It's just something about Chinese culture - people over here aren't self-conscious in the way that I am when it comes to bargaining. They're not thinking about the other guy's feelings, or what they might look like to passers-by. All they care about is getting a lower price, and nothing stops them.

I don't have that. Even having lived here in China for a few years, I've always had this tendency to sympathize with the vendor, and that never works out well for shopping.

It's gotten so bad that I don't take my Chinese or foreign friends shopping with me, or don't make purchases in front of them, and when I come back with my schwag and they ask me how much it was (something else about Chinese culture - everyone's obsessed with how much everything costs), I always cut 20% off the cost - and they still tell me that I paid too much.

Still, though, when done properly, bargaining is more like a performance than a chore - but I get uncomfortable just watching people bargain, let alone doing it myself...

Why is it that finding a good coffee machine in China is so difficult? I bought one at Carrefour yesterday for what I thought was the high price of 268 RMB - they didn't have the one I wanted and directed me toward an obviously inferior substitute, telling me that "it's exactly the same." After I demonstrated that the two display models were, in fact, not the same, the Carrefour guy insisted again that they were, in fact, the same.

Whatever. So I bought the coffee machine. I take the thing home, open it up, plug it in, and it doesn't work. I mean, the light comes on that tells me that it's working, but then it never actually makes any coffee. I left it on for about 30 minutes to make sure - completely useless Chinese coffee machine.

Pissed as hell, I hiked up to the end of my street and went to "Da Zhong Dian Something" - big electronics place, and found that they had somewhere in the area of 25 different coffee machines on sale - so I picked one up for $139 RMB, took it home and had nice, hot coffee ten minutes later.

The moral of the story: don't bother buying consumer electronics at Carrefour in China - it's always cheaper somewhere else, and there's always better selection somewhere else - not to mention the fact that the people at the Carrefour in China never have a goddamn idea what's going on.