First and foremost, I want to gripe about the internet here. China’s supposed to be using more internet bandwidth than the United States, and yet my connection speed here is miserable. Uploading pictures to the blog is a horrible hit-or-miss process, and I have to upload pictures multiple times to get them all up, even after reducing the file size tremendously. Downloading anything is near impossible for me, and I’m dying from the extreme internet censorship here (No YouTube, Digg, or Blogspot/Wordpress, but I can use Wikipedia to learn all about the T-Square incident. Real effective). Skyping is difficult as people can usually hear me but I can only hear about half of what people say when the connection gets really bad. At times, the internet just dies entirely. Very frustrating for someone like me.
We had class for the first time this morning since Thursday, but frequent breaks made it go by quickly. I’m enjoying class, but 8:30am is rough for me. I’ve never taken a class at Vandy earlier than 9am, and I tend to only make 1/3 of those classes when they happen. I’ve made it on time to all of my classes here so far though (keep your fingers crossed for me). Having a roommate on the same schedule helps too.
This afternoon we had another round-table discussion with PKU English-speaking students, and this one wasn’t much better than the first one. Fortunately, Professor Liu shortened this one to an hour in total rather than the last one which was an hour and a half. I do enjoy the conversations but sometimes it’s like pulling teeth to find something pertinent to talk about. My only comment during this conversation was a (seemingly funny!) joke about family life. There was a lot of pot-stirring about Chinese repression-it was interesting to note that the students knew that there was repression and that the media lies and all that stuff but they really didn’t care. We care about their lack of human rights way way more than they do-I say, live and let live.
Final stop of the day was the Silk Street shopping market-again, very impressive. Bigger and more standardized than the Pearl market it seemed like, but there was a lot of the same stuff. I bought a new wallet this time, but didn’t have enough to buy anything else. I can’t wait until I find a way to get more money so I can start buying things here-the fake stuff is incredible (both quality and price) and I’m scared I’ll lose all my money. And I can’t wait.
