I'm behind, part 2

Anyhoodies, we made our way back to Shanghai.  Alex decided that we needed a ‘group theme song’ so people started singing all of these songs *many were pretty throwback, haha* and yes, Don’t Stop Believing was one of them.  I managed to doze off on the bus (rides in the rain usually do that to me) and wake up to find us back in Shanghai.  It was kind of surreal to do that in another country.  It felt like I was in the twilight zone having dozed off in Hangzhou and woken up in Shanghai.  I do that in the States, but everything’s different in another country, eh?

    I didn’t want to leave the dorm for dinner so I hunkered down with some bread and a few cookies and crackers, haha.  Unusually unhealthy for me.  After maybe an hour, Elton walks in and asks if any of us want to go out to eat because he and the guys were going to a restaurant near campus.  I agree *to watch them eat, ahha* but I ended up getting a 2 Yuan vegetable soup.  It was nothing to write home about, but it was cheap, I wasn’t that hungry, and it had vegetable matter in it. 

    We depart after some interesting conversation (the two other girls that came along sat together so I sat among four guys, eh heh…).

    I have a quiz tomorrow which I feel eerily confident about since I started studying early  :P  I’m sleepy now  :O  Happy Father’s Day  :D

It was on the second floor…which meant I didn’t have to climb all six like I do for class, heh.  I get there with Elton because he has the same slot as me, and we walk into this small room with three laptops set up and two desks.  We each take a seat, give the guy our Chinese names (which is easy for Elton because he’s actually Chinese  :P  Well, moreso than I, fufu).  To sum it up, we each read a powerpoint talking about ‘head requests’, which is essentially making a request to someone.  There are requests according to power, social status, and amount of intimacy between the two speakers.  Like, the words you use are different if you’re asking something from your professor rather than asking something from a fellow student or a close friend.

    Apparently, you’re not supposed to use 可以 when asking for something from a friend which is what we’ve been TAUGHT to do.  Bleh.  The power point also said that Chinese language speakers are often indirect when asking for something by placing 吧 at the end while native speakers use direct methods “你给我那个书”à “You give me the book” instead of having a 吧 at the end which is more “polite”. 

    With professors and higher ups, you use 您看, something like “you see” with the formal usage of ‘you’, followed by 能不能 or 能。。。吗？ 

Anyway, the first part of this study is to read all of this info then apply it to the situations that are on the screen.  We had to speak it on the spot which felt really awkward.  The first time I did it, I completely blanked and there was maybe a 15 second pause, haha.  I really do hate this part of the study.  After that was listening comprehension about what we just learned.  We were given situation, then hear what the person would have said (their head request) and we pick whether it was pragmatically appropriate and grammatically correct, pragmatically inappropriate and grammatically correct, or pragmatically inappropriate and grammatically correct.  Long story short, I was happy to be out of there.  Too bad I have to do it for five more days  :P

    As far as my situational Chinese…  I often have no idea what I want to do or talk about with my language partner, so I finally look up some places in Shanghai that I haven’t been to yet.  Since this is my second time here in Shanghai, I always feel a little bad when my partner asks if I’m been to such and such place, and I either respond “yes” or “we’re going sometime this week.”  :/   SO, to remedy this, I hop onto Google (Hong Kong version, heh).

    I’m searching around partly for places I haven’t been to and partly for off-the-beaten-path locations.  I stumble across the Shanghai natural history museum  (上海自然博物馆 ).  I read a few reviews…and I’m sort of not surprised, haha.  Not the best reviews in the world, but I LOVE natural history museums (mostly the animal part, I could care less about the human evolution).  I was also excited about the gift shop  :O  The poor reviews were by expats, but there  were one or two good reviews by tourists and stuff (however that much counts…).  It’s a really old museum but I really don’t mind.  Old or pristine, it’s what’s inside that counts  :P

    So at this point, I’m all hyped up to go to a natural history museum in China.  My partner arrives and I tell her where we can go for the day.  She has no idea where it is (I copied down the address but she still wasn’t familiar with it) so we go back up to my room so she can look it up on the map.  After that, we head out and wave down a taxi.  The trip was only 26 yuan, a little under 4USD.  BUT…on the way there, Yang Ni (my partner) makes a phone call.  When she hangs up she says “The museum is closed on Mondays”.  :O

:O

>:O


    Of course the day we decide to go is the only day of the week that it’s closed.  GAH.

Instead of wandering around aimlessly, we walk to the subway station and take it to another part of downtown (not 南京路  Nanjing Rd.)  We go to the giant circular bridge raised above the street that gives you a really cool view of the city and we walk around (this is where my current Facebook profile pic is located).  We then go inside to this GIANT 10 story mall.  Methinks the minimum amount of floors in a Chinese mall is five….  The stores were mostly high-end and all that jazz.

    On the fourth floor, Yang Ni finds the restaurant she was looking for.  It’s a place that serves traditional Shanghai food.  I had chicken in duck blood soup (I had duck blood once before).  The duck blood has the consistency of 豆腐 (tofu), but slighty chewy once you starting biting it.  It has no real taste, surprisingly.  I added some vinegar and chili sauce to spice it up a little.  It tasted better after that  :D  I also ate some glutinous rice balls in fermented rice soup à  酒孃小圆子。

    Haha, Yang Ni warned me that the taste was…interesting.  And sure enough it was (I may add this entry to me food blog…).  It tasted like I was eating rice in wine.  I believe the type of rice they put in it is used to help make the wine.  Either way, the taste was a bit strong for me.  I jokingly asked if her intention was to liquor me up, haha.  She said it wasn’t strong enough and it wasn’t that type of wine.  I had maybe three sips of it, but the taste was a little too strong for me  :O

    The Shanghai spring rolls were pretty good.  By biased self still likes the Cantonese version better, but they were still 好吃。

Last but not least, the Sweet Glutinous Rice Cake.  It tasted good, but too much glutinous rice at once can be overkill on my palette, haha.  They had sort of a flowery taste to them.  Definitely sweet, but tactfully so.  Almost like chewing on a rose petal; that type of flowery sweet.

    It was a good meal and we decided to try for the museum the next time we met  :D


6/22/2010  (but typed on 6/26)

    I’m getting perfect scores on all of my quizzes so far.  Now, instead of just writing the characters, we have to write the character, pinyin, English translation, and make a sentence.  The total score has also been moved up to 120.  I think everyone in the class is doing fairly well, even if some of them struggle with memorizing the characters.

    After class I go to the language study with the dude and just to reading comprehension exercises that I was totally fine with, and it didn’t take an hour something of our time, maybe a little over half and hour  :D

    The class meets in room 620 for a lecture on Lu Xun (that I’ve heard before) and afterwards we proceed to the museum in the park.  I kind of skim through it since I’ve already seen it and we walk to Pizza Hut afterwards.  The pizzas are pretty good, I admit, but their apple juice is awesome!  It’s kind of like you’re eating liquid apple candy, but it’s tactfully done.  It was sweeter than the average apple juice found in the states, but I didn’t think “this is sugar water”.  It was just nice and sweet, if that makes any sense.

    Anywhodies, we all get back to the dorm and Carly and I hunker down for a night in.  Elton appears in our room after a while (Carly and I have an open door policy where we leave our door open and people can wander in at will…which they do).  He accidentally left his room card in his wallet which was in his room and Ryan (his roommate) was off somewhere.  SO, he ends up in our room and talks for a bit.  This began at maybe 6-7pm.  I also think this is the day I got the program on my computer to surf sites that I previously couldn’t so I was in and out for some of the conversation.  When I got back, we looked at a couple of videos and stuffs.
The highlight of our evening was when Elton and Carly was discussing movies and music and she mentioned “Requiem of a Dream”, methinks, and there’s that one song that’s really famous and everyone has probably heard it before but they didn’t’ know the title.  It’s one of those intense songs, so we started playing around with it.  At first we joked about going to the library with the song in the background and how you’d do everything intensely.  From there it kind of spiraled out of control and we tried to think of all of these mundane situations that you could perform with the music in the background.  Two of mine were favorited by them: Petting the cat and eating samples at Costco.  This went on for about an hour and something.  Carly managed to get some of it on film (hopefully this wont’ end up on Youtube, haha).  We made a list of things we’d do to the music next time.  Yeah, this is what we do when we’re not studying  :D



6/23/2010  (typed on 6/26)


    My partner didn’t show up today :O  I heard that there was some big exam but my partner didn’t tell me we were rescheduling.  I found that out the next day, eh heh.  So I got a free afternoon, save for the language research thing.  I had to speak again.  UGH.  Annoying~.  With those head request sentences.  Boo.

    There was another girl waiting downstairs and I wondered if she was a replacement for Wang Ni to hang out with.  She wasn’t, heh, but we talked for a good while.  She’s a freelance recruiter for models.  She’s looking for Western models and she gave me her name and number and everything.  I had a few people in mind that would maybe want to model, so I told her I’d help.  We also discussed teaching in China and their ever growing demand, and learning Chinese fluently.  She gave me some really encouraging words, especially about the teaching in China part.   She also suggested I seek out a Chinese boyfriend.  Haha, like I haven’t already started my search  ;D  Wouldn’t my grandmother be ecstatic, haha.  I also got to practice some of my Chinese with her  :D  We eventually parted ways and I headed back up to my room.

    Carly and I had some rare free time, so I took her to Duolun lu, the antique district of that area.  We were looking for scrolls and I saw this one huge and beautiful one of fish, but it was 360 yuan.  A little steep for me. 

    Anyway, I don’t think too much else went on today.  Elton came to hang out in our room again around 8, maybe, and we watched some you tube videos.  Either yesterday or today I was introduced to “The Grapist”, which, if you like slightly immoral humor like me, you’ll enjoy it  :D

Elton left around midnight, maybe, and we went to bed soon after.