Highlights:

- I went to pick up my student card today, and I’d forgotten my student ID (not the same thing). But lo and behold, the teacher actually went through the trouble of looking up my student ID number so she could give me my card. I had expected the response to be “Come back with your student ID. No card for you!”, but no – she was actually helpful. Wow.
- My appetite is back (maybe it was the pizza bingeing that did it). Last week Hannah was worried I’d be wasting away, but it’s all good now. I even found a place on campus that didn’t have a huge queue during lunchtime.

Lowlights:

- Waking up with eight mosquito bites, two of them on my face. Pretty. The mosquitoes here are very cunning, you hardly ever hear any buzzing but before you know it, you have a huge bite on your cheek.
- I have school 8 AM – 5 PM tomorrow.
- I have an incompetent landlord, so we won’t get the washing machine fixed until tomorrow. Possibly.

So lately I’ve noticed that my American accent has been wavering, because I’ve been talking to Hannah a lot (British/American/Belfast accent). The breaking point came today, when I was talking to an American guy with an English girl listening in. She then asked me if I’d lived in England, since I had a vaguely British accent. I was mortified – not because I don’t like British accents – they’re very charming actually; but I like my American accent, and I want to keep it American. I’m never going to have a pure British accent, and I don’t want mine to be a mixture. I want to sound like a native. Since English is not my native language, I guess it’s easier for me to inadvertently adopt someone else’s accent, than if we’d been speaking in Swedish. So another goal this year, apart from improving my Chinese, is to maintain my American accent. I refuse to let a conversation at 3 AM in Sanlitun be the pinnacle of my American accent-career. I want more people thinking I’m from Maine, dammit! (Or some other state. But not the South or Texas.) And since Hannah’s goal is to acquire an American accent, I’m not alone in this. Wohoo!