didn’t do that much today, it was bleak and raining or threatening to rain all day. Wrote out the chinese characters and did the homework. Wrote out my part of a group essay due thursday (a few pages). Wrote out the calligraphy homework for next week and did some math. Met with my tutor in… Continue reading November 8 – Day of rest

Got up at 8. First up was going to a CS talk. It was by a cornell prof. on concensus theory. He actually made it quite interesting, although it’s a field of CS that I probably won’t end up using much in my career. It’s dealing with how you can have a collection of unreliable… Continue reading November 7 – Breaking the Routine

Got through classes for a couple more days. I like the new book, it’s got a lot of useful words in it. Obama won the presidency, there was lots of talk among the group about that. Lots of liberal arts kids who are quite invested in politics. went to jinwuxing street market today, and got… Continue reading November 5,6 – Busy Week

Got up around 8. Spent the morning reviewing characters from the last week. Walked around campus when the attendants came to clean my room, but otherwise spent the morning studying. The test didn’t go great, but I think they knew that would be true, because they didn’t exactly set us up for success this week.… Continue reading November 4 – Tuesday

出车祸 – chu1che1huo4 – to get into a car accident 受伤 – shou4shang1 – to become injured 严重 － yan2zhong4 – seriously 医院 － yi1yuan4 – hospital 病房 – bing4fang2 – ward 住院 – zhu4yuan4 – to be hospitalized 轻 － qing1 – not serious 腿骨头 － tui3gu3tou2 – leg bone 撞 － zhuang4 –… Continue reading New Words

Got up for class. had chinese class, the dictation went fine. We’re done with this book now, all 36 chapters, there’s a week quiz tomorrow, and then we start on the next book for wednesday. Class was fine, although both me and sergio don’t have all the words fully internalized yet. after class came back… Continue reading November 3 – Monday

Forgot about this one, here’s the summary. slept in. didn’t do much in the morning. Around lunch time I went with jeremy down to the zoo area. Thats apparently one of the larger shopping areas in the city. We stumbled across what we thought at first was a bus terminal but turned out to be… Continue reading November 2 – Oops

Got up at around 8. Spent the morning fairly relaxed. Studied some chinese. Did the calligraphy homework. Did a bit of math homework. Surfed the web and read the magazine I brought back yesterday. Joe stopped by at lunch and invited me to go to a dumpling making event mid afternoon. Did a bit more… Continue reading November 1 – Dumplings

Got up at 8 ish. Class was from 10 to 12 with Prof. Zhang. We spent the first half discussing the topics from the newspaper articles we chose. I chose one on the election,some claim that palin was sabotaging the republicans chances. Sergio brought in one on the industrial growth of XiAn. The second half… Continue reading October 31 – Halloween

Chinese class in the morning. Talked with the professor over break about traveling. She recommended going to tibet, saying that there should be a a fast train to Lhasa that would only be 1-2ish days. That could be cool. Walked around after class to see if I could find a costume for Halloween. Didn’t, and… Continue reading October 30 – Hump