Beiwai Shirts

The very day we were leaving Beijing on October 27 - the very hour, actually - we finally found the sweatshirts we had been craving with the name of our school there, Beijing Foreign Studies University (Chinese and Asian colleges don't sell college merchandise the way American ones do, and boy, are they missing the boat). I had asked the students to be in the lobby with their luggage, checked out of our dorm/hotel and ready to go by 10:30 a.m. This group, which is always prompt, was ready and in the lobby before 9:30 a.m. So we had time for a last run to the store in the next dormitory, and students found these shirts for sale - the sweatshirts for 40 kuai, which is about $5. We love these shirts, and wish we had bought more, or that they had more for sale. The Japanese are amused by us as Americans wearing shirts in Chinese, which they can read because one of the three forms of Japanese writing is kanji, based on Chinese characters. (The other two are hiragana and katakana.) This is Parker and Jeff and I standing in the International Programs building at Kyoto Gakuen University in Kameoka, about half an hour west of Kyoto on the JR Railroad.