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Sunday, October 21, 2007

Back to school...

October 10 to October 19, 2007
I have been busy with a lot of homework the past 2 weeks so I didn't have much time to finish updating my posts from my trip and then do this so I'm just going to do the past 2 weeks in one shot because it was a pretty average week.

On Monday we went back to class as usual expect there was a typhoon again so there was a LOT of rain and wind and my umbrella broke so I work a big yellow poncho to class haha then the rest of the week was pretty uneventful, just studying and homework. Then somewhere along the way... I think maybe Sunday Lisa told me that her chinese roommate heard on the news or something that there was an airline offering round trip tickets to the Philippines for 2 kuai... or about 25 cents... So we looked into this and found that they did indeed have them for that much, but then they throw on 100$ in taxes. But 100.25 isn't bad for round trip tickets from Shanghai to Manila, Philippines so basically me and Lisa bought them on Monday but we had to buy them for November 9th and miss class instead of November 10th because they ran out of the cheap ones, but thats fine with me. So Tuesday I had to get up early and meet Yunqi who helped me go to the university to get a letter that says I can get a second visa. Then I had to go downtown to the Shanghai exit and entry something or other and apply for a second visa for me and Lisa. So this basically meant I had to fill out a lot of paper work and then sit there for 3 hours because they only had 2 windows out of 20 open. It was kinda like the BMV, you get a number and wait till its up and then go up to the window and do your stuff. I was kinda annoyed because the lady at the info desk said I needed to be there but then when we went up to the thing he just grabbed all the paper work and put it in an envelope and gave me a receipt... no questions asked so I had to miss more class for nothing, but whatever. So we can go pick them on Tuesday and then our whole trip is set! We also don't have to plan anything out because Lisa's step mom is originally from Manila and is arranging the whole thing for us so its going to be pretty nice.


Nothing else much happened these past 2 weeks except I found out we have a huge test next week over our whole book which is going to be fun because they haven't taught us very much from it at ALLLLL!!!!! Which kinda annoys me because I'm really worried about the grade I'm gonna get on it. Also I found out I have a test in my other class that they never told us about which is also going to be realllllly fun to deal with. I really don't like how they run the classes here. I have 2 chinese classes and a sociology class. One Chinese class is 4 days a week and sucks. One teacher teaches the first two and one teaches the next and its really confusing because they each do their own thing on different chapters which means we talk about one grammar thing or vocab words and we don't see them again for a week. Also one teacher goes off on hour long tangents ever class and the other spends 3 hours going over every vocab word and all that our tests are is grammar, but neither of them talk about the grammar AT ALL. So I feel like I'm not learning much from here. In our other chinese class it is 2 days a week and also has 2 teachers but they each teach half of it each day. The first teacher is great. She is really funny and keep us awake. The second teacher is the teacher from our other class that spends 3 hours on vocab and 0 on grammar, and surprise surprise she does the same thing in here! We just read each vocab word and give example sentences. Our sociology class is also a joke. All we do is listen to a chinese professor who makes sense less than a fourth of the time and then talk about the stupid papers that make no sense, and its 4 hours long... So no one is happy with that to say the least. So I'll take my tests next week and hopefully I can figure out most of the grammar before that :/


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