Day 10: Chinatown

I decided that my technical classes are pretty much Discrete Math Part II. But not my Discrete. The one I NINJA'd (TA'd, if you're not an Oliner). Networks is about large real-life networks and clusters and also about randomly generated networks. Combinatorial Optimization has been about matching thus far. Today we did Hall's Theorem but in rather a different way from the approach in Discrete. And Quantum Probability started by breaking out the partially-ordered sets to help define the kind of logical operations we need. In other words, my classes are super amazing.

With Chinese New Year coming up, I went to the Chinese market with some people. I think the group was half people who speak Chinese fluently and half with broken Chinese. I'm not sure who spoke less Chinese: me or the Indonesian kid. Apparently the Chinese part of town is sketchy. I was warned that people might try to steal my passport. It is unclear if this was a real threat or if it's an urban legend from people who do not go to Chinatown.

When we were looking for the market, we came across this gem of a store: A mannequin shop.

It was open, but if television has taught me anything, it's that a serial killer is headquartered in the back and if I went in I would surely die.

We found the market:

It wasn't really open. It was also definitely the sketchiest place I have ever been in my life. You can see the tarps in the photo. The whole place was covered in various tarps. We wandered around for a bit but left to try to meet up with the rest of our group.

They found an actual supermarket. It apparently stocked a particular brand of ramen that was much beloved by one of my friends in her youth. I took some of it try it and because ramen is a college-kid staple. But more importantly do you know what I found there? Peanut butter! There was actually a Chinese Skippy brand of peanut butter, but I got a cheaper brand. Butyeah, peanut butter. So good. And it's not really a thing around here.

Ended the day with dinner at a legit Chinese restaurant (as opposed to a Chinese buffet). They had a couple versions of the menu, one that was only in Chinese and one for foreigners that had pictures and the names of all the dishes in Chinese, English, and Hungarian.

Today's moral: When in need of peanut butter in strange lands, go to Chinatown.