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…
Photos
Settling in Nanjing
May 06, 2008, 11:58 am
It’s great to have Internet in your hotel room. When I was Hong Kong last time, it was really annoying having to use the public computers to check my emails and such. Now I can upload photos and add entries whenever I want.
We’ve been here about five days now. The flight left Thurs, arrived on Fri in Shanghai, and they drove us straight to our hotel in Nanjing. The hotel is located right at the edge of the Nanjing University’s campus, and is pretty much the University’s hotel. Hard to imagine a University with its own hotel, but here we are. The rooms are small, but everything was newly renovated. Strong air-conditioning, sufficient hot water. Traffic noises not too bad. Overall more than what we expected.
So there’s 25 students in our group, most are from Waterloo but we have a couple from Guelph. All range of disciplines, but mostly arts-related. Mostly Chinese, a lot of canto people, and a couple of white guys. No white girls. Range of ages as well, with some first year students to graduating/graduated ones. Seems like me and Mike are prolly one of the oldest ones there. Generally a fun and friendly crowd, some of the white guys hang out by themselves, but the main group of people go around together a lot.
Started classes on Monday. Speaking classes every day, reading four days a week, one culture class, one brush painting/calligraphy class, and one tai chi class. Classes are two hours each, and goes from 8 am to noon, or 8 am to 4 pm. Surprisingly, I have no problems getting up at 7 am every morning, there’s nothing like time zone differences to change my schedule.
The classes are fairly interesting, they split the group of us (25 in all) into A and B classes based on levels. A is advanced, B is beginner. To sort us, they gave us a multiple choice reading test. It was pretty much impossible to do unless you are fluent in written Chinese. Thus, we were pretty much divided evenly between students who got perfect, students who got zero, and everyone else is randomly selected. Apparently I’m a good guesser, as I got placed into the A class, and I couldn’t read any of the questions completely. I can manage the speaking class as I like the teacher and she speak slow enough, but the reading class is so out of my league. There’s a lot of new vocab to go through, and a lot of words to memorize. I find that between classes, meals, and studying, I really don’t have a lot of free time. Thus sad, what sort of vacation is this when I don’t have any free time to play?? 
Speaking of meals, we had a couple of interesting food adventures. For breakfast and lunch, we usually eat at the hotel’s caf, but for dinner, we go out. And by we, we mean like 10-15 of us in a group every night (so far anyways). It’s always fun trying to find food for that many people, but I’ve been impressed that almost every restaurant we went to could accommodate all of us without any prior notice or reservation. Chinese cooking is so efficient.
Check the flickr album for more details:
Food in Nanjing
We are also not left with a lot of time to explore the city. The first few days we were there, they took us on a quick campus tour and to the closest Walmart-like shopping centre. Other than that, we walked around a bit on our own, but it has been within walking distance from the hotel. There’s a whole bunch of tourist attractions in the city that we have not been to, and really not that much free time to check them out it seems. Maybe on weekends.
I will keep my flickr collection up-to-date with photos when I can. I don’t take my big camera with me too often cause it’s heavy (Sigh, should have packed the 50mm), and I also don’t have any photo editing software installed besides Picasa.
Flickr Collection: China Study Trip
Tagged: Travels
Comments (3)
check out hot springs in Nanjing, IF you have time
you’re like 3 hrs away from my parents 
I had to do a double take: no 50mm?!? I’m disappointed.
China is da best though.
Yes, the lack of the 50mm is my biggest regret. So many good photo taking opportunities that I’m missing out on cause I didn’t bother bringing the SLR out with me. Gah, I regret it so much that if I see it on sale here for a decent price, I just might buy it again…
© Maggie Tam 2007-2009 www.onechopstick.ca
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