On weekly activiites...

Every Wednesday I wake up and spend the whole day thinking that the next day would be Friday. And then at some point, I would realize that this assumption is false and that I have one more day to go before the weekend comes around.

So this semester I'm very busy. I am totally booked 9-5 everyday except Fridays where it's 10-5. Taking 5 classes and working part-time is apparently very time consuming. And at some point, I need to apply to grad schools and maybe look for a job. 2 of my classes are humanities classes which means lots of reading and writing. And D-Lab, which I just wrote about in a previous entry takes a lot of time because we literally don't know anything. I haven't slept a lot the past few days.

But it's okay because I really like what I'm doing this semester. I really enjoy my classes so I'm willing to put time and effort into them. And more importantly, wake up for them.

This morning I met with my partner for the Language Exchange program sponsored by MIT. They're a program mainly to help recent immigrants in the MIT community like students and spouses of graduate students and professors learn English. A side benefit for the native speakers of English who are volunteering their time is that they try to pair up these English speakers with people who speak a language that the English speaking person wants to learn. And in some cases, the exchange can be between other languages entirely. I read about this on the MIT Medical website and thought that it would be nice to help someone out.

So I signed up and they paired me with a wife of a graduate student. She is Japanese, studied Chinese in university, lived in Shanghai for 6 years, married an Asian American from Hawaii. Her husband's father is from Hong Kong and she said that when they visited his side of the family in Hong Kong, many of the relatives didn't speak Mandarin. So she wants to learn Cantonese as well as practice English. She and her husband just moved to Boston and she has no one to speak English with. Also, her husband is a graduate student at the MIT Center for Real Estate, the office where I work! What a coincidence. So I thought this was all very interesting. I don't know how much I can help her with Cantonese or English. Her English is very well and her Mandarin is way better than mine. They had lived in San Jose for 2 years before coming to Boston. But I think it would be a fun experiene. Maybe I can learn some Japanese...