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.
The date: October 12, 2009. The reason why it’s important: I had to return to work at Ekohe. It’s not that it’s stressful or terrible, but after a week of work and then a week of no work, I came to realize that working here might not have been the best idea. With all the traveling and the desire to go out and have fun, I guess it’s counter-intuitive to work during the semester. Not that I regret it. The chance to program a professional website is certainly appealing.
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After spending the last three days doing what tourists would do, it was time to do something many tourists usually wouldn’t do: visit a rural village. The last time I stepped foot in a village was twelve years ago when I was last in China and visited my dad’s home village, Taishan. This time, I got to see our tour guide’s village. To get there, we took a relaxing two hour boat ride there (cue “I’m on a Boat”).
The village was what I expected. Lots of farmland, farm animals and dogs running around, etc. Of course, this village had a ton of water buffalo. We got to meet Jessie’s family, which was nice. The family runs a convenience shop (possibly the only one in the village) and it seemed strange seeing cup noodles in the village.
Water buffalo!
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(Note: sorry for the extremely late posts. Really haven’t had any time to write these up with all the work recently)
Another looong day in Guilin. NYU had plenty planned for us and it was possibly the most fun of all the days in Guilin. After eating breakfast at Cafe China, it was time to grab some bikes and… wait, I mean, get in a car and drive to the Lijiang River. Since I don’t know how to ride a bike, I got to ride in a car along with other people who don’t know or don’t care to ride a bike. We kept stopping to wait for the bikers, which allowed me to take pictures of them riding. When we got to the river, we boarded bamboo rafts in pairs and went on a long and relaxing ride down the river.
Rafting on the Li River
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It’s once again the last day of class for the week and I’m again scurrying to get ready for a trip. This one, however, is much longer. Guilin for five days and then Chengdu for 4 days. That’s three times what Beijing was the week before. I’m excited, but back-to-back weekends with trips is really tiring. And I haven’t even left yet!
Anyways, the day started out the same as usual with Chinese. At noon, we had a health lecture given by Dr. Henry Chung, Associate Vice President of Health at NYU. I honestly expected something really boring, but he was an enthusiastic guy and was pretty funny too. He did, however, kind of scare me from eating some of the stuff at the back gate. All that bacteria…
Anywho, class ended and that meant packing, packing, packing. Funny thing is, it’s 4:44 (what a terrible number) right now as I’m typing this and I’m still not done packing. Darn our small dryer! I have about 45 minutes before I leave for Guilin. I am psyched! Can’t believe I pulled an all-nighter though. I wasn’t even doing homework. At least I got the blog updated again. I can’t imagine the hard time I’ll have updating when I get back…
