Just like Beijing last week, this is my pre-departure post for Guilin! Again, I probably won’t have internet access and if I do, I’ll probably only check email. I won’t have my laptop on me, so don’t expect any updates until at least October 3rd, when I return from Chengdu.
Anyways, my overall itinerary for this vacation:
09/25 – 09/29: Guilin
09/29 – 10/03: Chengdu
Talk to you all in a week!
(Also a note. I’ll get the rest of the Beijing stuff up when I get back.)
It’s once again the last day of class for the week and I’m again scurrying to get ready for a trip. This one, however, is much longer. Guilin for five days and then Chengdu for 4 days. That’s three times what Beijing was the week before. I’m excited, but back-to-back weekends with trips is really tiring. And I haven’t even left yet!
Anyways, the day started out the same as usual with Chinese. At noon, we had a health lecture given by Dr. Henry Chung, Associate Vice President of Health at NYU. I honestly expected something really boring, but he was an enthusiastic guy and was pretty funny too. He did, however, kind of scare me from eating some of the stuff at the back gate. All that bacteria…
Anywho, class ended and that meant packing, packing, packing. Funny thing is, it’s 4:44 (what a terrible number) right now as I’m typing this and I’m still not done packing. Darn our small dryer! I have about 45 minutes before I leave for Guilin. I am psyched! Can’t believe I pulled an all-nighter though. I wasn’t even doing homework. At least I got the blog updated again. I can’t imagine the hard time I’ll have updating when I get back…
Today was finally my first day of work at Ekohe! Even though I was exhausted, I was still looking forward to working. Since it was Wednesday, classes were short and manageable, so nothing to mention there. But after class, I went with Christian, who is also working at Ekohe, to the office. Since it was the first day, we didn’t do too much. We read about screen-printing and I learned a bit about Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR).
Ekohe plans to have me help with the CSS on a site and if I can get a grasp of Ruby and RoR, I might be able to help with the actual coding stuff. I’m actually really excited to learn Ruby and RoR. They were always on my radar and now I have an excuse to sit around and learn it.
Anyways, we were there for four hours. Eight hours a week shouldn’t be too bad, though seeing how tired I am already, I’m hoping I can survive adding in an extra eight hours of work to the week.
By the way, I had a Burger King bacon cheeseburger. I’m going to have to say Burger King China tastes better than McDonald’s China. Maybe McDonald’s will redeem itself when I try it again in the future (if I do at all. I really just wanted to taste it).
The most exciting part of the day (save of course that wonderful Chinese test in the morning) was going to the back gate of ECNU and interviewing the food stand and restaurant workers for City & Environment class. I’m amazed by how willing people are to talk to you, even with a video camera taping them. We talked a three people and they all had interesting stories and it just makes me want to buy from them more often. Which I indeed did right after the interviews =X
Unfortunately, the rest of the day was nothing worth writing about. I don’t think anyone’s interested in reading about me nearly falling asleep in class. I think that’s a given by now, which doesn’t make me look very good. Oops.
A tiring day. I think I could just end my post right there because that pretty much sums it all up. The Beijing trip was exhausting and I was feeling it. I only had one class, but a pre-departure meeting for Guilin meant staying a few hours more. A nap would have been nice =X
The rest of the day was nothing more than boring. I walked around trying to find stuff I needed to bring to Guilin (like a poncho). I probably should have just took a nap instead because I ended up staying up late reading for class and studying for my Chinese test.
I seriously need sleep. I almost forgot what happened on this day…