Getting Lost

I got so lost on my way to Chinese class today. I knew which quad we were supposed to be in, but I had not identified building four, and it was very difficult to find. I was with Andrea, Nate, and Caleb, and we went past building 4 to building 3, got a little lost in the second half of building 2, called both of our program coordinating professors for directions, and eventually made it to building 4. I was late for class (no more than 6 minutes, though), and I walked in when everyone had already started their quizzes.

Today's quiz involved unscrambling characters to make a sentence, then writing the sentence in characters, pinyin, and English. I had trouble with one of them, but it went well overall. When I finished, I was taken to the hall to learn our new tongue twister and read the dialogue in the book. We learned our new vocab, and since it involved directions, we played around with city and campus maps for the end of class.

Lunch was in building 3, which had a connecting walkway with building 4 one floor below us, so it was really easy to get there. In the lunch meeting, we were given our options for travel packages for the long weekend. The two packages were to either go to Yellow Mountain and Hongzhou or to go to Xi'an and a different, very steep mountain. I'm choosing the Hongzhou trip because it is an area with tremendous natural beauty, and it seems to be where my friends are going. I want to find a way to get to Xi'an if I can because I really want to see the terra cotta soldiers and the high school that has an exchange partnership with my high school, but for the long weekend this is the right choice for me.

We had a lecture on Environmental Health in China for Public Health class today. It was very interesting because the experts and government of China are fully aware of the problems and are trying to figure out a way to fix them, but because of the way China is developing, it is difficult to figure out which problem to prioritize. They have to tackle air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, endemic diseases, and the global impact all at once when these issues have historically come in stages. While the statistics of pollutant quantities were not the most relevant or interesting, I think this might be my favorite lecture overall.

I had an easy evening doing homework and such, but I did go out for dinner with Julia, Matt, Jeremy, and Robert to celebrate Robert's birthday. We ate in the Chinese restaurant in the building diagonally across from my dorm, and it was quite good. We ordered a tofu dish that was extremely delicious, though slightly frightening when the sauce started sizzling from the fire that was lit underneath it. We also had Chinese broccoli with garlic, black pepper beef, and there was a pork dish I didn't eat.

After dinner, I did some reorganizing in my room, finished my homework (I had to memorize a dialogue for class), and got to relax before bed. Today was just a simple day at school.

Today is awesome because I got to circumvent the line of non-students trying to get into the University and go in the student entrance, which made me feel really cool.