Uninteresting day of classes. Found out I still have a Chinese test despite the Xi’an trip. When I got home, I managed to pack with relative ease. I definitely learned from my previous two packing experiences (one of which kept me up all night). However, I still managed not to get any sleep because I was going crazy over On Campus Recruitment (OCR). I spent most of the night writing a cover letter and filling out the application for Deloitte. Cover letters really aren’t my strong point…
November 21, 2009
10/19/2009 – Day 58 – Cooking!
My Chinese midterm went pretty well. Knowing exactly what needs to be said sure beats the heck out of the usual written tests. Even better, since everyone breezed through their presentations, we got out of class half-an-hour early! Makes up for that time when we stayed over 45 minutes!
At work, I continued learning Ruby on Rails (RoR) since my bosses still weren’t in. I still had trouble grasping the concepts behind RoR and Ruby. After work, I stopped by Fresh Mart and bought some groceries. For dinner, I attempted to make fried noodles with Chinese sausage, eggs, and peas, but it didn’t go that well. They tasted kind of bland, but at least I didn’t burn the place down. And I did manage to crack an egg without getting egg shells into the egg! Exciting!
10/18/2009 – Day 57 – Waking up to the Sunset
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.
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.