Off like a Bullet

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Well it’s been a busy week. I’ve never been this busy for school before. I am in class for at least three hours every day, sometimes straight from 8 to 5 o’clock. In addition to class, I have eight hours at my internship plus all the homework, and writing assignments I have to do. School in China is a lot more demanding than school in the US. We are all so spoiled compared to students here. It makes me a little worried about our future; we won’t be able to compete with the students from China soon. I have to be very organized about my schedule and stick to it or I’ll fall behind.
I’m learning so much in my Chinese classes though. One is bound to with the amount of time we spend in Chinese. We have a grammar class every day, speaking three times a week, and listening twice a week. Listening class is the easiest by far; we have headphones and listen to dialogues on a CD and answer questions about them in our corresponding textbook. Today we listened to a song and tried to write down the lyrics, then we sang it all together. It’s a pretty song, but it was really amusing singing a love song in a classroom.
We went to a restaurant last night, and the food was delicious! There was a kind of pastry with a sweet bean filling, a whole roasted chicken, eggplant, mushrooms and cheese, and of course duck and lotus root with glutunous rice (we have this at every restaurant). All the pastries we eat here are so warm, and Mubin told me that it would be considered rude for a shop to serve cold pastries. This is interesting because in America, we serve cold pastries all the time. I can’t imagine eating a warm doughnut.
We leave for a weekend in Shanghai tonight! Needless to say, I’m pretty excited. Miss Li has our schedule jam packed with places to see—museums, Ningbo Street, the Bund, an aquarium. There’s so much cool architecture in Shanghai, with modern and traditional buildings, I think I’ll run out of space in my camera. We’re taking the bullet train to get there which has me a little excited and more than a little nervous. The news this summer of the train crashes does not help my nerves. Miss Li says that since it’s a short trip, it’s not as dangerous, but that still doesn’t make me feel good about it. Oh well, we’re off now so I’m praying everything is fine.

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Comments

[Jas]

Hope the Shanghai trip went well. Happy 21st Birthday, hunny!