Classes, Chinese, CCTV

Just thought I should write something. There hasn't been anything exciting going on lately.

I invited some MIT people over to Caius on Tuesday for dinner and 11 people showed up. It was great since they helped me use up a lot of my tickets. Somehow I still have quite a few and will still have to keep going to dinner diligently or else I'll need to invite people again. The good thing about eating there is that I can keep a dinner roll and/or yogurt and eat those the next day for either breakfast or lunch.

I've discovered that my Chinese has improved significantly! Yay! I can speak Mandarin so much easier now. And it's only been a month. If I manage to get an internship in China this summer... I need to put more effort into German though. That class is only once a week and the teacher is not so great so I'm not motivated at all.

Stella and I managed to keep one of our supervisors for an extra half an hour again. He must think we're really dumb because we can't do any of the problems. We haven't been working together at all this week so we're really behind. But he's a really nice guy and seems to care a lot about us so I guess we should try not to fail...

I went to a structures seminar today and the presenter works for Arup. He's working on the CCTV tower in Beijing and explained the engineering challenges behind the building. The building is an engineering nightmare but would be such an awesome project to work on. Arup is a really large international company and they had people all over the world working on bits and pieces of this tower. He said that some of the offices got together for dinner once and one of his slides had a picture of a dinner napkin that had doodles all over it. Apparently, at one of the tables, no one was bilingual and the doodles were supposed to be a history of England along with some stuff that looked like design calculations. That dinner consisted of engineers from London, Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong so there were 3-4 languages clashing and no one could understand each other. All the while I was thinking how much I could've contributed by knowing English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, as well as being an engineer (I mean, they must've had translators but how many translators can you find with engineering backgrounds?). It would be amazing to work on a project like that....

Yup, Brussels next weekend so I need to make some major headway on these example papers. At MIT, you finish a pset, turn it in, and then don't have to worry about the thing until you study for finals. But here, you work on the paper for hours and hours, go to supervision and ask questions, find out you've done things completely wrong, and then have to redo the questions again. Sometimes, you've only done part of the paper by the time supervision happens so you ask questions about stuff that you really haven't work on in supervision to get some clues. Then you go back, hammer at it, get stuck, and have to ask about it again at the next supervision. So it just never ends... You get to the point where the question sheet is wrinkled, dirty, and starting to fall apart and you feel sick at the thought of looking through the thing again. Ack!