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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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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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.
There was only one hitch in our final plans for Sichuan. We booked the hotels (which we actually need confirmation from…) and we booked our plane tickets. The problem? We’re paying in cash and we need the physical tickets. eLong, the company we booked with and according to Wiki, is a subsidiary of Expedia, had quite a novel solution. Imagine a suitcase and a guy wearing shades, a hat, and a trench coat.
Interested? Keep reading =D
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Finally, the last day of classes for the first week. Chinese started the day as usual and it was followed by a better-than-expected lunch at one of the ECNU cafeterias. I had a bowl of noodles and at only 4 RMB, it was totally worth it.
Today was supposed to be a pretty crummy day, class-wise, because my original schedule had a huge 7 hour gap in between Chinese and Law and Society. Luckily, NYU is adding another Law and Society class at 1-4 PM, so I don’t have to wait until 5 PM to go to class. The professor, Dan Guttman, is really enthusiastic. He made a really good first impression. The first class was entertaining, as we introduced ourselves and had a little fun mapping out China’s geography. He [poorly] drew a shape representing China and we had to name places (provinces, cities, etc.).
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