Tidbits

Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…

On Video Conferencing and China

April 23, 2008, 5:46 am

So Mike’s on a business trip in Oregon all week, and then we are off to China next week. I told him I will do the following this week: bike to work every day, come home and use the Elliptical, and then study Chinese. We both had a good laugh over that. What I really do is sleep in, drive to work, and play games and watch TV when I get home. Does watching Chinese movies count as studying?

We’ve been using iChat to video chat every night. The quality is actually quite decent, considering I’m using Bell and he’s using wireless. At least, the video quality is decent, the audio can be a bit jittery. So we also use text chat to clarify things. Overall, iChat was very easy to use because both my iMac and his Macbook come with integrated camera and mic. Just need to turn on iChat, click the camera button, and voila! Can’t set it up so easily with my parents’ PC since all they have is a cheap mic accessory, and no webcam.

For the China trip, we will be gone for five weeks. Gary moves back for school this weekend, so hopefully my parents will be up every weekend to check on things. It’s organized by the UW Confucius Institute where we’ve been taking Mandarin classes. We will spend four weeks taking classes at Nanjing University (language, Chinese history, etc), and then a week touring around Xian and Beijing. Oh, and the first weekend in Shanghai. It could be counted as a credit course for UW students, so hopefully there’ll be much to learn. The good thing about taking it as non-credit though, is that the test won’t matter, I won’t have to write a paper, and we can pretty much skip class if we want to. Haven’t really planned on going anywhere by ourselves though, as buying train and bus tickets can be confusing. We’ll see how it goes. It’s also probably going to be hot, but it’s kind of hot here now. It’s not fair really, I’m sitting here typing in t-shirt and shorts, and Mike needed his fleece in his hotel room. Rugh, what happened to Spring??

So in Nanjing, we will be staying at their foreign students dorms which are suppose to be more like hotel rooms than traditional dorm rooms, and they said there would be internet. I hope so, cause I’m lugging a notebook there so I can VPN in to work in the evenings. So hopefully that means regular updates and photos. But who am I kidding, I never do regular updates when I’m here, and I still haven’t finished uploading photos from Hong Kong. So ha!