I woke up at about 7am, since I got to bed yesterday so early. I was feeling less tired, but my cold hadn’t gone away fully. I showered, took another look over the vocabulary, and went to class.
Class went fine, the first hour was spent taking two tests, first a written test on the first four lessons, and then a dictation on the fifth lesson. I got a 93 on the written test, missing points for not remembering a few characters. My dictation score was 91. I hadn’t realized exactly what the deal was with the dictation, and was taken off-guard by some additional vocabulary that I hadn’t realized I needed to study. The dictation is actually two sentences from the dialog associating each chapter, so in the future i’ll need to read through that the night before and find out if there are additional words used I haven’t learned yet.
The second hour was spent reviewing the various grammar patterns and words introduced by the fifth lesson. It’s fairly intense but doable. I think it will be more so once I’m over this cold.
Afterward, I went with sergio and steven to the computer center to buy internet access for our computers. I proffered $315 kuai, and after a lengthy discussion the two ladies at the counter asked me for $405 kuai. I told them I didn’t want to sign up for december, and after an equally length calculation, complete with long hand multiplication on the back of a sheet of paper, they came to the agreement that it would in fact be $315, which I gave to them.
I returned to my dorm, and had no problems accessing the internet. I wrote out the new vocab for tomorrow, and chatted with my parents for a while.
In the afternoon after studying for a while, I decided not to stay in my room all day, and walked down to the haibei area. It’s one of the places we went during orientation, and has the largest carryfour (a supermarket) in asia. I spent about an hour walking up and down the aisles and looking at the various things they had for sale. I eventually bought some kleenex for my cold, and some tea.
The way out of the store was somewhat confusing. I followed the exit signs, which resulted in a very long hallway that was bordered on each side by a variety of stores. It didn’t really seem like it’s own shopping mall, and the crowd was flowing out of the carryfour to the exit, which made it very strange that there were a good 50-80 stores there. I eventually exited and hurredly made my way back to campus because the clouds were threatening rain and I had brought my unprotected camera.
I still had an hour before taiji class, so I drank some tea and did some more studying.
Taiji was fine again, we have now learned three of the four poses that are represented in the large garden, there are two more classes before we finish the session. I biked over there today, expecting that it would be finished once the rain started and I wanted to get back as quickly as possible at that point. Instead it didn’t rain, but I got wet since the seat of my bike hadn’t dried from the previous day.
After class I went to dinner with sarah at yet another dining hall. I got a couple of steamed buns with strangely minty vegetables inside, and a bowl of rice and some sort of meat/tofu. The texture of the meat was somewhat off-putting but the sauce was good, so I suppose the meal was a success. We talked about pitzer and how they didn’t seem to be quite as organized about things as either of our schools.
After dinner, I came back did a couple math problems, wrote up my core homework for thursday, and finished getting the vocabulary for tomorrow into my head. I drank more tea and am increasingly happy with my choice which was the cheapest of the three gunpowder teas they had available (tea leave rolled into little balls that unfurl once water is added).
I’m going to bed early again since I’m tired, and even though I don’t have class tomorrow until 2pm.
we just got news that there will be a meeting at 4:15 tomorrow to discuss the deal with traveling to anhui this weekend, it should be interesting.