Got up at 7am. Took the midterm. It went fine, I can write well now, although my reading comprehension isn’t as good. A reversal from where I’ve been before, which is cool. It gives me something different to focus on, especially since I feel like I’ve got the memorization thing down pretty well at this point.
After the test I went back to my room and wrote out the calligraphy homework. Did a bit of catch-up on correspondence, and a bit of research into additional things to see this weekend in xiAn. It looks like there won’t be quite enough time to go out to hua shan, since our flight back is at 3 pm, which is mid afternoon. I did find the main shopping streets in the town, as well as the other attractions though from asking the pomona language resident who grew up in the city.
I also stumbled across a couple other interesting looking areas to try and get to after the trip is over.
The core class period was used for a discussion of our rural stay. It wasn’t all that informative, most the same points we had all experienced while we were on the rural stay. The only thing that was interesting was that Prof. Wang talked about her history. She was in the student protests back in the 80s, and then was in england as they finished up. She talked about seeing the student leader who went to cambridge after the protests ended and thinking that he was a politician and a fraud. It was really interesting to hear how she initially was really disillusioned by the chinese government, but then the rallies and seeing the leadership of it safely in england talking about it’s political significance brought her back towards the side of the government.
Next was calligraphy, we looked at the standard style, I still can’t quite get the ‘silkworm head, duck tail’ style of the strokes, but most people can’t, so I don’t feel too bad. I should buy some paper to practice with at some point. The class was reasonably interesting.
After class not a ton was going on. I went out to dinner, got a ‘pizza’, a piece of bread with ham and peppers on it. The chinese style bread too, rather than italian. (that is: really fluffy, and really sweet.) it was interesting to say the least.
In the evening I wanted to go out and do something. I was hoping to get out to one of the night markets, but nobody else was really that excited about the prospect. The second year students have at test tomorrow, so were all studying. I ended up going out with max and rebecca again. The plan was to bike to the subway station and then take it to a nightclub in sanlitun. I was able to cary rebecca on the back of my bike without problem, and I feel a bit more comfortable doing that now. Max’s bike kept loosing it’s chain though. He was borrowing it from alice, and she needs to take it to one of the numerous mechanics and get them to take a couple links of the chain, since it’s way loose. Since it had fallen off a couple times before we got out of the college, we figured we hadn’t really come up with a workable plan.
We ended up going over to wudaoko again. We met, by accident, one of rebeccas friends. A girl who’s chinese name is lanju who also went to saas for highschool and now goes to davidson. She knows jenny and gray, as well as william kostner and kelvin bates. (all of whom I know to some degree from lakeside.)
I left when they started dancing, since I wasn’t quite willing to get to bed that late, and walked back to campus. Collected my bike from where I’d left it earlier in the evening and came back.
Leaving for xian tomorrow afternoon. Before that i’ll meet with my disp advisor and hopefully get some interviews done.