My Second Post!

So, I originally started a blog on another website, but then found it to be inconvenient for my readers. Plus, I can finally now acess Google blogspot...and Facebook! I finally feel complete, haha.

What have I been doing in these past few days? Well, classes began Sept 8. I'm taking a gym and English course for fun. Interestingly, even master's students are required to take gym! As for the English course, it is titled "Contemporary Medicine English." We regularly watch clips from 20/20 and other media news distributors. The other day, I invited one of my friends from the main Fudan campus (Handan) to my English class. When we walked in, everybody turned to stare at him (yes, he's Caucasian American). The entire situation was a bit hilarious. We watched Obama's speech promoting nationalized healthcare. The professor translated Obama's speech into Chinese and my friend and I were, like, that's not what he [Obama] said.

The other day, I had to go to the internet office to ask why I still do not have internet access in my room. The staff members told me I would receive a phone call. I thought that I had received a text, but since my cell phone currently cannot display Chinese characters, I only saw black blocks and some numbers. As the female staff members ate their lunch and watched a typical Chinese drama, I sat in the office (bit of an awkward situation). One lady then had the bright idea of me forwarding the text to her so that she can view the message. When I did, it turned out that the message was a commercial asking me to buy a computer. When the internet guy finally did call me, I was initially quite rude to him because I thought he was trying to sell me something. Oh dear. I've just heard so many horrer stories about telemarketers here trying to embezzle people's money. I've even heard that some pretend to have kidnapped your friends and/or family and somehow even know their names.

Change of subject: Just a few days ago, I attended a biochemistry conference. Of course, I barely understood anything, but tried my best to remember what I learned in high school AP Chemistry. The department is working on a new website and they would like me to help them translate it into English. I think it should be quite fun. After the conference, a few students and I had dinner with the professors. It was quite sumptious...two types of fish, crab, exotic-looking vegetables, duck meat, etc. I still can't get used to the ceaseless "gan bei" (cheers) that takes place throughout the meal. I mean, it's just too much standing up for a meal!

If you ever travel to China, you'll notice that many people have (what I consider to be) interesting names. For example, the ones I personally know are: Stone, Big Bear, Summer (for a guy). I've heard some are Celery, Sucky...

Finally, I'm taking an extremely interesting course called Sexual Health, AIDS, and Homosexuality in China. The professor is awesome and there are always guest speakers. Furthermore, students do field work outside of class. For the first class, we watched "Kinsey." I've already seen this, but it was quite interesting to witness students' reactions...several gasps. This past Friday, a professor from Nanjing University came to speak about the drug culture in China. Apparently heroin and something called K-powder is quite rampant...not much of a cocaine culture here.

More news to come...