Monday June 23, 11:41pm
It’s been a long day today, definitely one of the longest I’ve had in a while.
I started the day at about 5am when my body decides to give in to jet lag and would not let me fall asleep again. Since Min and I slept on the couches in the living area, I didn’t want to disturb her too much with too much movements. So instead I went and read my shanghai guidebook and played a bit of Pheonix Wright. At about 8-9am took a shower, went down for breakfast and then headed over to school.
David from Red carpet mandarin sat down with us with a teacher and went through what we wanted to achieve in the course. At our meeting, we established how we wanted to take the course, chose course textbooks and determined course focus. We had to read a passage and it seemed that we’ll also need to work on our pinyin since we both have our own “accents”.
Our business teacher was a girl named Helen who studied international business in Scotland. She was pretty cool and very nice. We learned a bit about org structure in Chinese, the terms and such and then learned about office supplies. I think tomorrow we’ll go right into a Business in China case study book which looked extremely interesting. This will definitely be a great learning experience especially if it ever comes up for work in the future. They were also very eager in incorporating importing and exporting things into our course but we think that might be a bit too much. I wouldn’t mind learning about how to do business here though, but we’ll see what we can cover in such a short period of time.
We had lunch at the cheapest Italian restaurant in town. A set lunch, a pasta of some sort plus a salad and a soup cost only 15 RMB which is about 2-3 dollars Canadian. The food was alright but filling. Min then really needed her coffee so we stumbled upon a posh little joint that is apparently Taiwanese on the 4th floor of a building.
We also got a bit of opportunity to see the city better and took a better look at jing an temple. I still cant believe such a landmark have a shopping center on its ground floor. Our afternoon teacher’s last name is xu and she also thinks that I have extreme problems with sheng diao (tones). I will need to basically memorize in order to improve.. and she says practice is key. So hopefully I’ll practice enough in the next 3 weeks to be understandable… not even aiming for the standard :P
It then started pouring at about 4pm just when we were about to get off class. Min and I were both not very happy with it as we were wearing sandals. Note to self, just wear rain boots for no reason or have them with me. At least I had my umbrella.
WE also went to check out another place that we’re hoping to move to. IF all goes well we should be able to get our money back from here and move in tomorrow. I’m excited already.. because we’ll actually have internet included this time and the place is much closer to the school (2 minutes walk) vs. ??? walk.
Min and I still need to plan out what we want to do in shanghai and whether or not we want to take day trips to Suzhou and hang zhou. I think those are musts, it’s just a matter of when. I should probably end this post now and pack to be ready for moving tomorrow and some awesome shopping ;)
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