After talking to Fanny all night, I slept until four and didn’t get out of bed until five. I was still sleepy when I got up and probably could have slept for a few more hours. I pretty much did nothing but waste time and then do homework. I prepared my presentation for the second part of my Chinese midterm and memorized it before plopping back on my bed.
November 21, 2009
10/17/2009 – Day 56 – Counting
A somewhat odd day. That’s the only way to describe it. I mean, counting customers at a McDonald’s and Burger King in China? Yeah, strange-sounding. Anyways, Irene and I were assigned McDonald’s while Jane and Christian went to Burger King and it was chaos. We got there around ten minutes early to give ourselves enough time to order food and find a seat. The line was not only enormous, there were also no seats. We almost didn’t get a seat by noon, our designated start time.
Coincidentally, when we started counting, the foot traffic started getting more intense. We could barely keep up with the people walking in and since we weren’t just counting, but also taking down demographic information, we were writing like mad men. For 45 minutes, we were writing and writing and I’m glad the last 15 minutes were relatively calm. We ended up with about 340 people in an hour. I-N-S-A-N-E. Treated myself to a funky tasting ice cream cone topped with honeydew melon syrup afterward.
Got home and compiled the data and actually did some work. For dinner, Joe and I ordered from Hello Pizza, which sells personal pan pizzas. I got a classic pepperoni pizza with extra cheese and for only 22 RMB, it was good and filling.
10/16/2009 – Day 55 – Suzhou
What better way to end a stressful week with a field trip to a highly industrial and technologically advanced industrial park? A mediocre field trip to a highly industrial and technologically advanced industrial park. To be honest, I was really looking forward to this trip, since the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) sounded very intriguing.
We had to take a one and a half hour bus ride to SIP, which I luckily slept through. When we got there, we sat through a brief presentation about the area, which I found to be the best part of the SIP tour. As for the area itself, it is impressive. The planning is meticulous, as should be expected for a place with Singaporean influence. We were given a bus tour of the park (which is enormous), but it wasn’t very interesting. Even though the place is clean, it’s too sterile for my liking. The streets are pretty much empty (probably because almost EVERYONE who lives there is working). I would hate to work there.
10/15/2009 – Day 54 – Interviewing Chinese students
Exciting day! We got to interview ECNU students today for our Chinese midterm! As a Chinese person who can’t speak Mandarin, I was fully prepared to say I was Japanese or Korean in order to not look like a complete fool. OK, maybe not Japanese. Don’t know how they’d react to that. Fortunately, it wasn’t that bad. The girl I interviewed gave me short and simple answers (like “eat cake”). She even complimented my Chinese!
Since I didn’t finish my definitions for Law the night before, I scrambled to finish the other half before Law. Looking up definitions basically became my studying as I finished shortly before class. I had about half an hour to remember everything I looked up. Nice.
10/14/2009 – Day 53 – American Food
Boring classes sums up the first half of the day pretty well. Chinese was boring and Contemporary China was worse. I never thought anyone could make a picture presentation so boring, but the presenter somehow did it. At work, I spent most of my time learning Rails on Ruby (RoR) again since my bosses still weren’t back. Learning how to program in an object-oriented framework is a lot different than learning procedural programming, though it does get me thinking if I should revamp my site using a framework.
After work, instead of studying for Law like I should have been, I went to Mike’s birthday dinner. We ate at a place called Southern Belle that served Southern food. We were sitting outside on the patio, which was delightful since the weather was great. Free popcorn certainly helped too.