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.
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.
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Doctor’s appointment day! Couldn’t be happier to see a doctor, something that usually wouldn’t happen. During Chinese class, we were told what our Chinese midterm would be: interview an ECNU student in Mandarin, write an essay about the interview, and then present it. Not exactly what I was expecting, but in retrospect, it beats memorizing ton of characters for a written test.
In law, the guest speaker was actually interesting, but he took a bit long to finish. I had to rush to my doctor’s appointment and was late by a fair amount. Luckily, everything went by quickly and I got some good news. The doctor examined my bites/spots and agreed with me that they probably were just allergic reactions to the bugs. He gave me steroid cream and an anti-histamine called chorphenamine.
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.
Rain + hole in shoe = disaster. That pretty much sums up my day.
It rained all day for the first time since I arrived in Shanghai. Rain storms aren’t fun in NYC and they’re even less fun here, mostly because it becomes even more hazardous to cross the streets with all those bikes and mopeds. Anyways, I got my first dose of heavy rain when I went out between classes to Trust Mart to get a hiking backpack. It isn’t exactly a short walk out to the front gate where Trust Mart is, so I got soaked. I tried my best to tread through the rain carefully so the water wouldn’t get into my shoes, but it was raining too heavily. Luckily, I did find a hiking backpack. Too bad my luck seemingly ended there…
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