总重红绿灯 | Stoplight in the Sky

The other day I heard the loveliest radio jingle. We were in a cab, myself and a few other students, and we were all listening to the taxi-cab radio station in Hangzhou, which offers music and information tailored, I suppose, to cabdrivers, which includes brief English lessons and the like. Anyway, the station call-sign jingle comes on: FM九三FM九三，空中红绿灯 (pinyin is FM jiu san, FM jiu san, kongzhong hongludeng). Best translated as “FM 93, FM 93, the stoplight in the sky.” Quite charming.
In other news, we went to the Xihu Tiandi Starbucks last night to do homework, and Jiang Cong, my past and present roommate in the CET program, had a cappuccino. Compared to last year, Cong has shown a willingness to stretch the envelope. He’s tried red wine, Guinness (albeit “foreign extra” i.e. barrel-scrapings), and now a cappuccino. Last year he mostly watched dating shows on his computer, but this year he’s studying for the civil service exam and didn’t even bring a computer along. Last year he was one of many Chinese roommates who barely left the dorm room, which was, for most of them, a vacation from their 8-man, sweltering, mosquito-ridden rooms into a high-bandwidth air-conditioned heaven. I suspect, without cause, that the CET program prohibited them from bringing computers along this year.
Otherwise, I should probably get back to work. 6 hours of homework a day still isn’t quite cutting the mustard. I’ll post about the language immersion experience later.