* 8/17/09 8:31pm Day 44: Naptime! *

Today was such a chill day. After class, I met Ariel for lunch. I hadn’t seen her since everyone left about 2 weeks ago, so it was good catching up with her and seeing her again. I practiced my Chinese with her! And she was very impressed with how much I’ve learned in 2 weeks. HAH. All the studying must be paying off. But still, I don’t feel like I’ve learned THAT much. I can’t have an extended conversation with anyone, and to understand other people they have to talk fairly slowly. Anyways, I’m very jealous of her summer though, because all she’s doing is sitting around watching TV, sleeping, and hanging out with friends. Haha, that sounds like my summer last year. But anyways, it was fun to hang out with her again. She said she might apply to this exchange program that Fudan has with the UC system, where students who are chosen can go to a UC and study for a semester or a year. It’s a pretty competitive program, but I think she could do it if she wanted to. Hopefully she’ll be able to come :)

After that, I came back to the hotel and just studied. Class is so fast now! Well, it’s the same pace, but the new teacher is pretty fast. He speaks pretty fast and even though he’s not strict with our pronunciation, he kind of rushes us through exercises so we speak fast too, which makes our pronunciation worse. But anyways, he expects us to be prepared for class, meaning we have learned the words BEFORE coming to class, so now I am trying to do all my memorization the day before class. So far so good, I’m not falling behind or anything. But the lessons keep getting harder and harder and the number of words keeps increasing, so it’s definitely going to get hard soon.

After studying for a little bit, I just fell asleep. I knocked out for 3 hours. Joanna is hanging out with one of her friends that is visiting from Beijing, so she’s been out all day and that’s why I’ve been on my own all day today. But man, it was a GOOOOOOD nap. I feel a lot better now, so hopefully I’ll stop falling asleep in class now. I think China should be like Spain and have siesta, where everyone just closes down in the middle of the day for naptime. That would be some great stuff.