The Real Reason I Came to China

With all the shenanigans that have been going on the past month and a half it has to come to an end at some point. I've been having a blast getting to know Beijing and China and I can't wait until my pictures are in order so that I can show you all what an amazing adventure I had travelling the Silk Road. But, I did come here for one thing and that is to study. Now, I know that this hasn't been the most official blog on the internet. Sometimes I may not use proper English and most of the time I don't even type in complete sentences. It's hard enough to make time to post often enough and I sincerely wish I could have time to check my spelling, review my grammar and proof-read my entries. However, I don't have time and I'm sorry.

Now that I've explained my lack of professionalism, I can talk about my past few days. I started class yesterday (Tuesday) and so far so good. I began my day with my Intermediate Chinese class. It wasn't nearly as hard as some of the other students made it out to be. Although, after talking with a few of my classmates, it seems as though I have a slightly easier professor than other classes. My teacher is a 26 year old woman. We address her as Li Laoshi (Teacher Li). She is very nice and takes the class at a slow and steady pace. She spoke about 3 sentences of English the entire period. I have Chinese class three times a week from 8 am until 9:50 pm. I'm really excited to start getting into this class. I really hope to become fluent by the time I leave China. I can already get my way around (kind of) and I just need to expand my vocabulary and work on my sentence structure. A person is only as smart as the words they know, so it is my goal to learn to read, write and speak as many new words as possible.

My Arts of China class was intense. My teacher is a Dartmouth undergrad and a Harvard grad student. She has taught in Beijing three times before and this is her fourth time teaching for The Beijing Center. She is working on her dissertation, which has something to do with the Forbidden City, and she loves her job. She actually loves her job so much it is intimidating. We are going to be going through 3000 years of Chinese history. The thing I love most about this class is the fact that art and history go hand in hand. Although we will be learning about Chinese art, we will also be learning about the historical events associated with certain art movements and styles. It will be a history lesson as well as an art class.

My third class was Business Finance. This was an interesting class. We jumped right into the book and begin with future and present values, which I've already done at Fordham. Also, we worked on amortizations and loan payments and all that stuff. The professor explained everything in an extremely difficult way, making it confusing and lengthy. Many of the students were utterly dazed at his explanations. It will be interesting to see where this course goes throughout the semester.

Once again, I hope everyone is doing well. I wish some of you guys would comment on my posts and let me know what you think about my adventures. Simply click on the comment link below this post and you can leave messages and read what other people think about my travels. Remember, I leave tomorrow night around 11 pm to go to Qingdao. There, we will be meeting up with one of our old leaders from CYCAN, Serena. She goes to the Qingdao International Beer Festival almost every year and knows of many places to eat, shop and relax in Qingdao. I'm excited for my weekend and finishing my first week of classes.