The first stage of the Qilu UT marathon started with a head-start for me and a lot of eating. Also, the coach already gave up before the second half of this stage.

Because of the holiday last week, classes will start again today, followed by tomorrow and then we continue with our normal schedule. So today we thought we had to be at the university at 8 a.m., but when we got to the classroom there were already a lot of Chinese students in the room and that was definitely not our classroom. So we figured that we started classes at 10 a.m. so we could go back home for some time. Today we were having the same classes as on a normal Tuesday and tomorrow as on a normal Wednesday.

After this head-start we got classes a bit later and then ate lunch. For the second class the teacher didn't show up. Probably because he didn't know it is a Tuesday today. Last week he told us that it was his first lecture at this university. So I am not surprised that he doesn't know this change in the timetable, though we also know it. Well at least that meant that I could go back home again.

In the afternoon I went around the campus to take some photos, the weather was perfect for that today. I have uploaded the photos of the campus here as well, so take a look if you want to know where I am going to classes, if they're not cancelled by the beamer, a new teacher, a teacher's meeting or a photo session with the police.

For dinner today we went to the business street to a typical Chinese restaurant. When we came there the waitress sat us down and stayed near our table to take our order. I asked for another few minutes so that we could actually read the menu. We saw that they have it in both English and Chinese. She didn't really understand and kept waiting for us.

After a while I think she got a bit inpatient and asked a girl from another table to talk to us in English. She also didn't really know what to say and just pointed at one thing on the menu and said: ¨I would recommend this dish to you¨. We had no idea what to expect and just went with it.

This seemed to be the right choice because the food was really good, even though we are still not sure what we ate. What we got was, first of all, a plate with salad, nuts, very spicy chicken and pepper to make it even spicier. Besides that we got a big bowl of soup. In the soup were noodles, different kinds of vegetables, egg and a piece of some animal. What animal that used to be is still unknown to us. Roman thought it was fish, but it definitely didn't look or feel like fish. Victoria had no idea and I thought it was chicken.

After paying the bill we got some discount vouchers for a prospected next surprise dish. The voucher displayed a dish which looked like the one we had and there was written in English that the meat in the soup was duck. We're still not a hundred percent sure if that is what we had, but that's the best clue we had. So yeah, maybe chicken, probably duck, poultry for sure.