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Published: March 11th 2011
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Hello once again! I am currently sitting in my dorm room after a long day of testing in the lab. My room is quite comfortable, but I must admit I have one complaint with it. The dormitory is located right beside the hotel on campus, and for some reason, every day from 6:00-9:00 am and 7:00-10:00 pm the hotel feels it is necessary to play music out over its courtyard area (right outside my window). Now, normally, I wouldn't complain about this, but every day they play the same exact song over and over again! It is some tinkering piano tune, and I think it is slowly driving everyone in the building crazy. I frequently get texts from my friend who lives down the hall, saying, "I can't take it anymore!!" Sometimes, we go for a walk just to escape the haunting melody. Perhaps we are all part of a larger psychology experiment that I am not aware of...
Life in the lab has been busy! The other day, the two professors who run the lab took the entire lab out for a nice dinner in honor of my visit. It was lots of fun, and I got to try
3-D camera and room where I do all my work
A guy named HuXiao works in the adjoining office and we sometimes distract each other when we don't want to work (kind of like how Matt and I work in our lab in Canada!) many different types of fancy Chinese cuisine. Some of it I liked, other things not so much. For example, jellyfish is not something I will ever eat again, haha. Outside of getting used to the cuisine, I have been doing tons of testing. I need to test 80 adult participants on the PSAP aggression task, the Eysenck personality inventory, and the Raven IQ test. Then, I take five 3-D photos of each participant (neutral, happy, sad, angry, afraid). It is sometimes very hard to get the participants to fully express the emotions, largely because the culture here encourages subtleness and suppressing one's emotions. I often try to demonstrate the expressions for the participants, and I probably look like a fool because I make the emotions ridiculously over the top! The participants will then try to imitate me, often to humorous effect, and we'll all start laughing and then the whole process has to start all over again! The things I have to do for research!
Two nights ago, I went out with my friend Jessica (not her real name, of course. Almost all Chinese students choose an English name that they also like to be called.) to downtown Jinhua.
She is from a city about one hour outside of Jinhua; this city is famous as it is the place where many of the goods that are shipped to the U.S. are manufactured. She is an English major here at Zhejiang Normal and thus speaks English very well and I find it very easy to communicate with her. She showed me around the major shopping districts and we went inside a giant mall that was 7 stories high. I must say, I am absolutely loving the fashion here! Everything is so cute and it is just my size! Plus, it is really inexpensive. I have a feeling that I am going to be carrying back much more than I originally packed to come here! Now, most importantly, inside this shopping mall, on the very top floor, I discovered something that brought great joy to my heart- a roller skating rink! This is relevant because I have been lobbying the people in my lab back in Canada to go roller skating with me for months, but the closest rink is in Mississauga and no one wants to drive all the way up there with me! I may just have to lace
up some skates and zoom around the rink here in China!
This afternoon, I went out for lunch with a bunch of friends to a hot pot restaurant. It was delicious, and I was taught many new Chinese phrases that are actually very useful ("I don't understand," "Please bring me the bill," etc). Nothing too eventful happened this afternoon besides a lot of testing. However, this evening, I arrived back to my dorm around 9:30 and parked my bike at the end of a huge row of bicycles like I usually do. However, as I was putting the chain lock on the bike, the front wheel suddenly swerved to the left and hit the bike beside me. Next thing I knew, all the bikes started falling over, one by one. It was like watching a horrific game of dominos, and there was nothing I could do to stop it! Thus, I was outside for an extra 10 minutes setting all the bikes back up again. What a way to end the day!
So those are the events in my life up until about an hour ago! I have one more very full day of testing this week, and
then I am taking all of Sunday off and not doing any work that day! We are planning our hiking expedition that day, so I'll be sure to update you on that event! I hope all is well in the U.S. and Canada. We are getting the first signs of Spring here and I have a feeling it is going to be beautiful! 😊
PS- I have received several e-mails from people asking me if everything is okay here regarding the tsunami warning for countries near the Pacific. We are far enough inland and thus Jinhua is completely safe! 😊
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Sarah
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Oh Lindsey, of course the bike dominoes would happen to you ;) I'm looking forward to stories and pics from your hike in the mountains!