Wow, almost Tuesday. I've been in this country for one week and it feels like it's been a year. Thankfully, Vienna was the same way. I guess there's a certain period of adjustment for these kind of trips that makes the first week seem like an eternity. I haven't even really done anything yet! Here's hoping each passing day is filled with more excitement and more notable experiences!
Today was pretty good. Apparently, we're taking the class (Traffic Engineering) with about ten or twelve Chinese students. Although they must have known what they were getting into, I feel bad for them- their understanding of English is good but not fluent by any means, so their understanding of class discussion is slow. In addition, there's a clear difference in standard of living. We all had laptops. None of them do. As an introduction, we were all asked to stand, state our hometown (yeah nation's capital REPRESENT!), and say what mode of transportation we use. Of course, we all have cars. They all have bikes. That made me feel kind of awkward. I don't know if I was ashamed or embarrassed or what, but definitely awkward. So since our notes are on the computer, Dr. Hummer asked us to intersperse and pair up with the Chinese students. My partner (whose full name was really long, but told me to call him Yuan) is really nice, but he had difficulty grasping what we discussed. Nonetheless, class went well and hopefully three hours of traffic every day won't be a drag.
After another *lovely* cafeteria lunch, we returned to the hotel for some relaxing before our guest speaker. The guest speaker was Mr. Wei Xia (pronounced "Mr. Sha Vey"), the vice director of Jiangsu province's DOT. The presentation was also given to a lot of Chinese students who I perceived were graduate students in their School of Transportation. Well, it was a cultural experience for sure. There were two simultaneous powerpoints: one in English and one in Chinese. Mr. Wei gave the presentation sentence by sentence in Chinese, pausing so his assistant could translate into English. It was interesting to hear their innovations in highway design, but the 2-hour lecture was pretty long for most of us!
So those are the highlights from today. Dinner was at a somewhat western restaurant, but I had chicken curry. And before anyone accuses me of eating non Chinese food- have no fear, I couldn't taste it anyway. Stupid cold. Oh yeah, don't worry about swine flu either, because my temperature is still 36.8!
That's all for now. It's only been a day since my last post, but the words just kind of came out, so why not have another one? I'm sure I'll post again soon! Bye for now!
No comments:
Post a Comment