Chinese and other classes

These past few days have been going by really slowly. The pace of life here is definitely slower than MIT. There's not much assigned work, just a lot of things that you know you should be doing. I've been meaning to read textbooks, go over notes, etc.

I saw Ross today. This guy is going to Amsterdam for the weekend. He said that some of his classes is stuff he's seen in 14.01 and 14.02. But he said that there's a lot of reading for one of his classes and he just spent the whole day reading. Still, I'm envious since I feel so behind. Even in my Chinese classes.

The other students are so good! I went to Oral Chinese today. There's only 6 other people in the class so it was pretty informal. But I feel like I'm intruding since they all know each other so well. Anyhow, some of them did a presentation on their trips to Taiwan and China. Most of them went to Taiwan for 2 months this summer. One girl talked about how she traveled around with her friends. Another girl talked about her visit to Yennan after her Taiwan trip. She had done a gap year there after high school (to teach English) and went back to visit friends. This gap year stuff sound really cool although I have doubts about whether I was mature enough... Back to the other students. One guy talked about his stay in Beijing with a host family and how they made him go to bed early, get up early, and would not let him travel around because it's unsafe. After his presentation, the teacher and the other students remarked on how much his Chinese improved.

All these presentations were nearly 15 minutes (that's 4 pages of writing!). Very impressive. They occasionally use wrong adjectives and their pronunciation isn't very good. But they know more vocabulary than I do. They can make a lot more sophisticated sentences. All I know is stuff that you use everyday which really isn't much.

My supervisor for Chinese asked us to listen to BBC Chinese. There's one other person in my supervision. He's also supposed to be a 2nd year student in Chinese but he switched to another department but still wants to continue with as much Chinese as he can. He also did a gap year in China and his vocabulary is really amazing. I'm not sure how he's faring with BBC China but it's really hard for me. I can hardly understand. It's mostly political stuff though so hopefully that's the reason. And they talk so fast! Once in a while I'd come across a Cantonese program and I don't have any problems understanding that.

My other classes are going okay. I really don't know about this "Geotechnical Engineering" class. I mean, we talk about soils. At least I don't have to do any review for that class since it's new stuff for everyone.

Haven't been getting 9 hours of sleep though. It's really sad. I was really looking forward to having a sink in my room and getting 9 hours of sleep every night. Sigh.