October 29, 2009

09/30/2009 – Day 39 – Of pandas

Our flight to Chengdu wasn’t until late at night, so we sat around for awhile at the Guilin airport. When we finally boarded, I was immediately knocked out. I didn’t even notice we landed when we did! We arrived pretty late at around 1:00 AM and Chengdu airport made it more painful by taking forever to bring out our luggage. On our way to the hotel, our taxi driver had an empty road, so at times he drove 140 km/h. I’m pretty sure he averaged 100 km/h…

Our hotel wasn’t the best, but what can we expect from a 2.5 star hotel? It was really cheap, so it didn’t really matter. It also helped that the staff was incredibly helpful. When we were trying to figure out what were going to do during our time in Chengdu, the receptionist was very accommodating. She helped us book a van to drive us to the Panda park and even helped us arrange a tour of Leshan and Emeishan. She even let us keep our luggage at the hotel while we went on the tour!

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September 6, 2009

09/03/2009 – Day 12 – Chinese provinces

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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