After my terrible night, I was confronted with something straight out of a nightmare: a Chinese test. I’m bad enough at foreign languages as it is and Chinese characters don’t help. Listening for the different initials and tones was hard, really hard. I’m pretty sure I bombed that part. I also lost three points on the oral part and swapped the characters for six and seven on the written part. Oops.
Luckily, my headache mostly disappeared. Ironically, when I got home, I read an article about how eating certain food can cause terrible headaches. Great. Let’s see what I ate right before I got my headache: rice, Chinese sausages, and orange juice. Oranges were part of that list of foods, so maybe it was the orange juice?
My first full day to do just nothing. I slept until 1 PM, when I finally decided I should be more productive. I went to Carrefour to do some grocery shopping. With my limited Mandarin skills, I can’t possibly imagine going out to buy stuff to eat every night. Have to do some good ol’ cooking.
Funny enough, after returning from my first trip to Carrefour, it turns out Bram wanted to go grocery shopping as well. Since I didn’t really buy everything that the kitchen needed, I went for another round of shopping. We got most of what we needed, except for a wok. Most importantly, I did find out that real orange juice exists in supermarkets. It’s just not very cheap. At 12 RMB, it was twice as expensive as orangeade and only half the size. Oh well, it’s well worth it.
Two rounds of grocery shopping were enough for me. Luckily, I didn’t have to go for a third round in one day.
Twelve years. That was how long it had been since I last visited China. After twelve years, I finally saw my cousin Joe again.
The day started slowly. I was exhausted from the week and probably still a bit jet lagged, so I slept in. I woke up around noon and finally decided to head out and find Canon’s repair center here in Shanghai. Luckily for me, it was easy to find. There was an entrance to the Yalong International Plaza, where it was located, from the Metro station. My wish came true when I found out almost everyone there working for Canon speaks English. Canon couldn’t tell me what was wrong with my camera without having their engineers look at it, so I left my camera with them. At the very least, the repair will cost 420 RMB if they don’t have to replace any parts. Unfortunately, I read that the type of error I got was likely a main board failure, which means I will need a replacement part of some sort. Bummer.
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