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.
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.
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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.
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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Just less than two months ago, I spent countless nights planning a trip for twelve people to Philadelphia. To put it bluntly, it was a pain in the ass. Well, I got another taste of furious planning tonight. After some of us decided not to go to Hainan, we planned our own trip to Sichuan, the place I originally wanted to go. If you thought planning in the US was hard, try planning in China as a foreigner. No foreign credit cards, Chinese-speaking representatives, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. PITA indeed.
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