Day 3: Today was the first day of classes, and well, it was a lot more than I expected, but hopefully, after taking these classes, my Chinese will get better. To explain briefly about my classes, we have class Monday through Thursday. Also, during our 6 weeks in Shanghai, we will be taking 3 weeks of Business Chinese and 3 weeks of Chinese for Current Events. In our 3 weeks in Qingdao, we will be taking Economic Development and Sustainability in China. Finally, for all 9 weeks in China, we will be taking a class on Chinese Conversation. Wow, that's a lot. But, again, hopefully, after these classes, my Chinese will get better! After classes, we visited the school cafeteria, which has ridiculously cheap food for the amount of food they give us, and I keep forgetting to take pictures, but I'll make sure to take pictures and upload them soon. Today, we also had our first day of 武术 (wǔshù AKA Martial Arts), and, wow, it was more tiring than one would imagine. Can you find me in the pictures?
The highlight of my day was visiting Metro City Mall right next to our host university with my roommate. The best thing about being on the Xuhui Campus of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) is definitely how close all the malls, transportation, and food is. Anyways, I had to go to the mall to find an adapter for my computer charger because I realized too late to buy one in the States. [Word of advice: when going to China (or any other Asian country), please make sure to buy an travel adapter.] After bothering the information desk lady with my bad Chinese, I found my way to the extensive computer section of the mall where I found an adapter. We decided to explore a bit, and we made our way to the top floor, 大食代 (dà shí dài AKA Food Republic), which was basically a huge mall food court designed to look like street food vendor shops. I wanted to try everything, but we decided to eat dumplings and get fruit smoothies. We went down to the basement to get these long bread pieces filled with cream that had a really long line. Again, I forgot to take a picture of the bread and note what the store was called, so I promise I'll go back and take a picture and upload it. Luckily, I got a picture of the dumplings? And a bad picture of Metro City Mall (the big red ball on the left picture) that I'll retake at some point?
Day 4: Again, today, we had class, and our first dictation quiz! It was different from any dictation quiz I had taken before, but at least I now know how to prepare for it, right? Our professors were nice and gave us a day off from our tutoring session to recover from the 时差 (shíchā AKA jet lag), which was awesome. I spent the day just exploring the campus because it takes me a long, long time to remember roads and directions, so I definitely needed the practice. Afterwards, I proceeded onto getting homework done and falling asleep, which was definitely not the best way to recover from jet lag.
Day 5: Today was more exciting. After class, we had our first 太极 (Tàijí AKA Taichi) class. It was definitely more peaceful and relaxing than our martial arts class on Monday, but with my terrible arm and leg coordination, it was hard to follow along and remember the moves, but hopefully six weeks of the class will at least teach me the basics. Our professor mentioned that Taichi is supposed to heal our bodies, and I'm definitely ready to be "healed" after my rough Spring semester, so I guess I'm looking forward to this class more than martial arts. There was also a photography class held in the same location as our Taichi class right before us, and even after our class had started, the people didn't leave and decided to take pictures of our class, especially the foreigners (or the non-Asian students) in our class, so that was a little awkward, but I feel like it's something I'll get used to while here. Luckily, because I'm Asian, I blend in here so well that most Chinese people pay no interest in me, and I've actually had quite a few people here ask me directions. Here's a picture that I took of the photography class who was taking pictures of my classmates. Wow, that was kind of a confusing sentence! We also had group dinner today, which saved many of us from having to go explore and find food to eat. Doesn't the food look good?
Day 6: Yet again, we had class, but today was the last day of class for the week, which was a nice feeling. However, we had tutoring today with the local tutors from the university after class. After much confusion on what our individual time slots were, I headed to meet my tutor. I can't remember what the characters to her name were, but she said I could call her Mao. So I did. We read through my Chinese text, and she helped me with my Chinese tones, which is probably one of the biggest reasons that Chinese people can't understand me. Like past alumni for this program said, even after the first day, I felt that the tutoring was very helpful, and definitely felt that it would be awesome to have more time with the tutors, but I guess I should just be thankful for being able to work with the tutors twice a week for 30 minutes each. After tutoring, I chose to finish homework and head to bed because we had a field trip planned early tomorrow morning.
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