Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Only a month left

How the time flies.  I'm sitting here in this huge fancy mall at Costa Coffee, now my favorite coffee time/ study place.  The semester has flown by, and as much time that has elapsed since last post, I can speak in general and sum things up pretty well.

Here is my schedule that I've had nearly every day this semester:
5:15am, wake up, go running at the track with all the old people
6:30am, head out to the metro to get to Huangpi Nan Lu
*I do all my reading and vocab memorization on the metro, much easier to focus than when I'm sitting at home or anywhere near my computer...

7:10am, arrive at Hungpi Nan Lu, walk across the street to Wagas, order scrambled eggs with toast and a medium cappuccino.
* They recognize me, always leave the power strip sitting next to my table.  I use the brown coffee sugar on my eggs and toast, makes for a tasty breakfast

9am, get back on the metro and head back to campus

10am, start class

12pm, lunch at the "Foreign Student Cafe", as we've nicknamed it...

3pm, class ends, head home to play some piano and start studying, or head out to some cafe to start studying (Tues and Friday are Internship days, so I go there instead).

10:30pm, try to get to bed... most days by 11pm I'm able to get some sleep.  Just been really tired from all the studying.

Friday - Sunday, I tend to sleep in till 6am (Sat or Sun I just don't go running, sleep in till I wake up), and study, work on some music, talk to friends in the US online.

Basically, all I do is study Chinese.  Kid you not, from 3pm till about 10pm I'm in my books, trying to memorize the 50 characters or so for the next day's quiz, doing all my readings, written hw, etc.  So much to do!  No time to really get out.  I haven't explored much of Shanghai, maybe a day's worth of tooling around, but really I'm so busy I just head out to a popular area, get to a Costa Coffee (they're everywhere, and they have free wifi and plenty of outlets), and just study for several hours.

The main troubles I've had here are 1) retaining stuff from class and 2) dealing with all the oil in the food my host ma makes.  Don't get me wrong, the food is very tasty and very chinese... just the "thing" with Shanghai food is that Shanghainese people love a lot of oil.  That's one of the reasons I head out for breakfast, just so I don't start off the day with an upset stomach... haha... (other reasons being I study better on the metro and outside my room, and I love being out in the morning).

Speaking of studying a lot, I'm on 'vacation' this week, and I need to get working on my homework for next Monday.  It never ends... well, actually it will.  In 30 days.

Till next time.

2 comments:

  1. Time flies indeed. Proud of you, man. Seems like you're learning a lot!

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  2. Might I suggest a tactic I used to help me retain information from class when I was studying a foreign language? Always associate words and letters (or perhaps in your case, letters that are words and phrases!) with a mental image. The mental connection between the symbol and the thing it represents is so vital as to constitute the very essence of all sucessful language use! Think about it.

    Love you Sir.

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