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.
My Chinese midterm went pretty well. Knowing exactly what needs to be said sure beats the heck out of the usual written tests. Even better, since everyone breezed through their presentations, we got out of class half-an-hour early! Makes up for that time when we stayed over 45 minutes!
At work, I continued learning Ruby on Rails (RoR) since my bosses still weren’t in. I still had trouble grasping the concepts behind RoR and Ruby. After work, I stopped by Fresh Mart and bought some groceries. For dinner, I attempted to make fried noodles with Chinese sausage, eggs, and peas, but it didn’t go that well. They tasted kind of bland, but at least I didn’t burn the place down. And I did manage to crack an egg without getting egg shells into the egg! Exciting!
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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Today was finally my first day of work at Ekohe! Even though I was exhausted, I was still looking forward to working. Since it was Wednesday, classes were short and manageable, so nothing to mention there. But after class, I went with Christian, who is also working at Ekohe, to the office. Since it was the first day, we didn’t do too much. We read about screen-printing and I learned a bit about Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR).
Ekohe plans to have me help with the CSS on a site and if I can get a grasp of Ruby and RoR, I might be able to help with the actual coding stuff. I’m actually really excited to learn Ruby and RoR. They were always on my radar and now I have an excuse to sit around and learn it.
Anyways, we were there for four hours. Eight hours a week shouldn’t be too bad, though seeing how tired I am already, I’m hoping I can survive adding in an extra eight hours of work to the week.
By the way, I had a Burger King bacon cheeseburger. I’m going to have to say Burger King China tastes better than McDonald’s China. Maybe McDonald’s will redeem itself when I try it again in the future (if I do at all. I really just wanted to taste it).