Interesting note: Day 60 is the middle day of the NYU in Shanghai program. Boy, that was quick!
Got my Chinese midterm back and I did surprisingly well (a 93)! For Contemporary China, we made a trip to the new ECNU campus to attend a panel on Sino-US relations to commemorate the 30th anniversary of China opening up to US talks. The new campus is beautiful, but it’s also in the middle of nowhere (well, across from Jiaotong University). It was a pretty long ride from the old ECNU campus and we even passed a toll on the way there. The panel discussion was really interesting though. I was particularly happy that the ECNU students didn’t do everything from rote, like traditional Chinese education teaches them.
Unfortunately, we got back pretty late and I still had to go to work. To meet my four hours, I stayed until nine, again learning more Ruby on Rails and again being perplexed by it. I didn’t quite expect it to be so difficult to grasp, but it certainly proved me wrong.
Woke up and saw no improvement in the bites/spots. Nothing was working, so I made a doctor’s appointment to check on them. Nothing particularly interesting happened, except Guo Xiaojie did give me a map of China. I only asked them where they got them so I could buy one, but they gave one to me for free! Yay! I hung it on the wall in front of my desk so I could look at it any time I’m doing work. Nicole Lee also happened to be in town and was surprised when I saw her in the student center.
Contemporary China was pretty interesting this week. We watched a documentary about a family and their housing problems. They lived in a tiny house and couldn’t wait for the government to relocate them. I wasn’t very sympathetic for them though, since they said some outrageous stuff about 9/11. Regardless of the actions of a few politicians, 3000+ people DID NOT deserve to die.
Another day, another adventure in Beijing. On the agenda was Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Summer Palace , and the Beijing Olympic stadiums. Amazingly, we got through everything with time to spare at the end! I guess it’s because we woke up at 7:00 AM and it took us the better part of the day to finish seeing everything. (I mean, we ate dinner at 10:00 PM…)
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More shady dealing! Since we bought more plane tickets, we had to wait for another guy give us the tickets in exchange for a giant wad of cash. This time, it was at the front gate of ECNU. It really does feel awkward doing the exchange, especially in broad daylight and in such a crowded area.
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Today was a make-up class day =(
OK, so it wasn’t that bad. I only had Chinese. The next make-up day will be the worst, since I’ll have three classes. And this was one Chinese class we needed because we have another test on Monday. Things are starting to get more difficult. We learned a bunch of new characters and the pinyin and tones are still killing me.
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