Amassed details over the course of last week

My toilet just clogged for the seventh time. Really, this is getting excessive.
More thoughts on the food here - grain carbohydrate is cheap. Really cheap. About 3 kuai (at most) will buy all of the grain you really need for a single meal. Green vegetables are also pretty cheap. At the Conference Center where I stay, about 5 kuai will buy a meal's worth of reasonable non-oily vegetables.
On that note, my diet has gradually been going more and more vegan, since I'm not the biggest fan of boiled eggs, all the milk is whole milk, and I can't attest to the quality of meat. The biggest problem, food wise, is general lack of variety (especially in the vegetable department).
I recently bought Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Not just a book about fighting, it highlights a lot of Taoist mentality as well (especially "action through non-action" and other such paradoxical ideas; the ideal of war is to "win without fighting" in the same way that, as an anecdote says, the best doctor is never known because cures no one,, because his patients are never ill).
I notice that a lot of the examples we use in class involve using new grammar rules to describe just how busy and tired everyone is. I think it's counterproductive - everyone always talks about how tired they are, but really, there's no reason to keep talking about it. We all know it, it's clearly evident, let's move to a better topic already, preferably one that challenges us to use different words. This goes .double for outside-of-class discussions as well, where others are excessivly wordy about their state of business.
Ate lunch with my Chinese "baba" and his daughter on Monday afternoon. His daughter works at China Mobile, and is very interesting. My Chinese is definitely a lot better - this time around, the conversation wasn't nearly as one-sided as it was last time, and my "backread" time, the time it takes me to comprehend a relatively complex sentence after it is said, is much shorter. That said, though some differences between Chinese and American culture can be considered "politeness" by both sides (like the level of moderation present in Chinese speech), there is a very big difference which, though Chinese people consider their side of the practice "polite", Americans (or at least me) do not. That difference is how Chinese hosts press food and liquor on their guests - not to do so is considered impolite, and not to drink to drunkenness (host and guest) is considered impolite as well. Though Chinese people consider this polite, Americans consider it rude to do so, and so this difference is not one of more or less polite but rather how politeness is defined. Baba asked me if I wanted a beer, which I agreed to out of politeness (despite having class in an hour, I felt that there would be enough time for the effects of half a bottle to dissipate enough). However, since we were at the Muslim restaurant on campus, there wasn't any, and despite his repeated efforts to obtain some, he wasn't allowed to bring bottles in, so I was saved from having to find another excuse to not drink much. He also repeatedly put food on my plate - to deal with this, I didn't say "no" or "I don't want it" (which is impolite) but rather just left it there.
I'm considering a longer stay during my sophomore or junior year (term or year, leave or term(s) abroad), though I'm a little frustrated by the sheer amount of time I spend sitting down here (even less than the last summer spent at Siemens).