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May 07, 2009
Thursday
Authored by JM
After a long night on the yesterday, it was a little rough waking up for class today. We all met in the lobby around 8:30 and walked over to the school for our first day of orientation. We met with the lead coordinator named Jodie and then took a group picture. The Chinese really are professionals about taking pictures and it was a whole ordeal for us to assemble the group for a excellent picture.
After taking the picture, we went back into the classroom for our first lecture. It was about Social Trends in China, which was a little dry, but the Professor did a very good job. For lunch, we went to a restaurant named Yan, it was not very good. There wasn't enough of decent food and it ended up being a white rice type of meal. The second part of the day we spent in the classroom learning basic Chinese. The Chinese have to laugh at us because we are really bad with mastering their whole tone structure which is the basis for their language. We tried very hard, but it was a little much. We learned some basic words, but the scope of the class was wrong. The professor tried to pack in a little too much for the lecture and it just became overwhelming. We decided it would have been better if we just had more time to practice.
We ended class at about 3:30 and got back to the hotel around 4. Some of us were going to try and play basketball, but we ended up running out of time because we had a Welcome Dinner at 6 that night. The Welcome Dinner was at the hotel and the food was pretty good. It was nice eating with some of the students and we enjoyed the whole day. Both John and I were pretty exhausted after all the activity for the past couple nights. Some of the group went to the movie, while we ended up just going to someone's room where we just ended up just socializing. John and I ended up falling asleep at 10:30 and it ended a very busy couple of days for us.
No new pictures to add from this day! But as always, check the main picasa page.
Posted by jfavorit at May 7, 2009 12:11 AM