Food is everywhere! I haven't gotten tired of it yet, although I can foresee the time I might get tired of rice, noodles, dumplings, tofu, vegetables, and meat with lots of bones. Anyway, there are little places on every corner, and most of it is very cheap. Lunch here usually runs from 5 to 12 kuai (under a dollar to almost 2), and dinner maybe a little more expensive depending on where we go. I haven't cooked a single meal here yet, and it really would be more expensive and more hassle to do so, although perhaps healthier. Also, I am going to turn into a really impatient diner here. Food often comes within a few minutes of ordering, especially ordering one dish at lunch. We went to a place that had pizza and pasta a few nights ago, and waiting 25 minutes nearly drove me insane!
I like my roommate a lot. His name is Xin Qiang, and he's from Dalian, a city on China's northeastern coast. He studied law for his undergrad, and now he's doing a master's degree in translation. We stayed up late playing card games a few nights ago; he taught me some Chinese card games, all of which use jokers, apparently. And in Chinese, you call all card games 'poker games', so I thought we were going to play poker at first, and then he was like, "This is how you play this kind of poker!" and I realized he just meant a card game. He's really extroverted for a Chinese guy, and we talk a lot.
I don't think I've blogged about district conference yet. Have I? I'm typing this on my iPad right now, because I don't have Internet (another story; my neighbors changed their Internet password again, I'll have to go back and offer to pay a month or two for them, I guess, because otherwise I'll have to sign up for a year contract and waste a lot of money). Anyway, on the way back from district conference, a few of us ran across a Chinese doctor in the train station and talked to him for a while. He got his medical degree from Beijing University and then spent five years at Dartmouth doing research. He worked in Boston and lived in the US for 25 years. Anyway, he gave us his card and told us about a medical conference in Suzhou on Tuesday. One of the Flagship guys, Seth, is going to med school for neuroscience, so we gave him the doctor's card and he left the day after we got back to attend this conference and make contacts. While he attended, there was a presentation on intellectual property and biotech patents by a lawyer from a prestigious law firm in Beijing, so he went to that and got his card, which he gave to me when he got back. Tortuous method of getting someone's card, no? Anyway, I emailed him on Friday with my resume asking him if there was any chance of an internship at his law firm next spring, and he emailed me back the next day saying of course and that he wants to meet me when he's in Nanjing next week and that we'll discuss details then! Score! I still need to research his firm a little more and maybe hold off on deciding, but for now this looks very promising. He's the senior partner and has represented Google and other well-known companies before the Supreme People's Court of China!
Five of us went to Xuanwu Lake for the afternoon last week. It was probably the most beautiful day of the year, and we decided on a whim to rent a boat for an hour. We didn't fit in the four-person paddle boat, so we got a motor boat instead. I say motor boat, but it was about the slowest, most pitiably weak excuse for a motor boat I've ever ridden in. Still, we had fun. We pretended to ourselves not to know Chinese and proceeded to boat under some bridges we weren't allowed under. After the first one, I got on the roof of the boat and sat there for a while. We crossed under another bridge and some girls waved and took pictures of the crazy foreigner! I wanted to shout my email address or phone number at them so they could send me the pictures, but didn't. They wouldn't have heard clearly anyway...
My roommate is now looking up movies online of different accents in English and making me mimic them - why did I get a translation major as my roommate?! :)
I like my roommate a lot. His name is Xin Qiang, and he's from Dalian, a city on China's northeastern coast. He studied law for his undergrad, and now he's doing a master's degree in translation. We stayed up late playing card games a few nights ago; he taught me some Chinese card games, all of which use jokers, apparently. And in Chinese, you call all card games 'poker games', so I thought we were going to play poker at first, and then he was like, "This is how you play this kind of poker!" and I realized he just meant a card game. He's really extroverted for a Chinese guy, and we talk a lot.
I don't think I've blogged about district conference yet. Have I? I'm typing this on my iPad right now, because I don't have Internet (another story; my neighbors changed their Internet password again, I'll have to go back and offer to pay a month or two for them, I guess, because otherwise I'll have to sign up for a year contract and waste a lot of money). Anyway, on the way back from district conference, a few of us ran across a Chinese doctor in the train station and talked to him for a while. He got his medical degree from Beijing University and then spent five years at Dartmouth doing research. He worked in Boston and lived in the US for 25 years. Anyway, he gave us his card and told us about a medical conference in Suzhou on Tuesday. One of the Flagship guys, Seth, is going to med school for neuroscience, so we gave him the doctor's card and he left the day after we got back to attend this conference and make contacts. While he attended, there was a presentation on intellectual property and biotech patents by a lawyer from a prestigious law firm in Beijing, so he went to that and got his card, which he gave to me when he got back. Tortuous method of getting someone's card, no? Anyway, I emailed him on Friday with my resume asking him if there was any chance of an internship at his law firm next spring, and he emailed me back the next day saying of course and that he wants to meet me when he's in Nanjing next week and that we'll discuss details then! Score! I still need to research his firm a little more and maybe hold off on deciding, but for now this looks very promising. He's the senior partner and has represented Google and other well-known companies before the Supreme People's Court of China!
Five of us went to Xuanwu Lake for the afternoon last week. It was probably the most beautiful day of the year, and we decided on a whim to rent a boat for an hour. We didn't fit in the four-person paddle boat, so we got a motor boat instead. I say motor boat, but it was about the slowest, most pitiably weak excuse for a motor boat I've ever ridden in. Still, we had fun. We pretended to ourselves not to know Chinese and proceeded to boat under some bridges we weren't allowed under. After the first one, I got on the roof of the boat and sat there for a while. We crossed under another bridge and some girls waved and took pictures of the crazy foreigner! I wanted to shout my email address or phone number at them so they could send me the pictures, but didn't. They wouldn't have heard clearly anyway...
My roommate is now looking up movies online of different accents in English and making me mimic them - why did I get a translation major as my roommate?! :)
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