Lesson Two: Getting Acquainted

It's been pretty crazy since we got here, so I'm posting a few days behind schedule. Hopefully I'll catch back up after this weekend, but until then, I'm going to try and post 'em by day. By the way, if you're tagged on Facebook, it's because you either requested to read this or I thought I could benefit from your constructive criticism when it comes to blogging, as I am no expert. :)

Tuesday May 12, 2009

After a semester's worth of classes starting at 11:00, I don't know how long it is going to take me to adjust to waking up at 7:00; I've slowly but surely stopped being a morning person, but luckily jet lag is still on my side. We'll check back in a week or so to see if that changes. Our first class was today at 8:30 and ended up just being a review of our previous two semesters. At the end of the day we did an oral evaluation to determine which class we would be in; since I had done two semesters of Chinese at UCA I needed to get in the third semester class, so I was kind of worried that my spoken Chinese (which is abysmal, by the way) wouldn't be good enough to get me into the class I wanted. It all worked out though, so tomorrow we're scheduled to start our first day of real class!

We also got to meet some of the Chinese students who are studying to teach English when they finish their degrees. About fourteen ECNUers signed up to be our conversation partners, which means that they will pair up with each of us from UCA to show us around Shanghai and help us work on our Chinese. My partner, Jenny, knows traditional Chinese folk dancing, which is apparently very graceful and smooth. Jenny looks pretty graceful and smooth, so I definitely plan to hit her up for a few dance lessons. Because we all know that graceful and smooth are two words to perfectly describe me.

Tonight we all went out as a group to have dinner with three of the Chinese students, Nancy, Sophie, and Joe. They ordered us some rather delicious Tsechuan food and we got to talk to them about everything from different dialects around the country to popular culture to their feelings on politics and government. It was really interesting to get a Chinese perspective on America and to give them our perspective on China, and I feel like we had a pretty significant cultural exchange going. All in all, it was a pretty good day over here in Shanghai.