* 8/3/09 6:35pm Day 30: First Day of Language Class *

Today Geneva, Joanna, and I started our language class. it was pretty fun…but it was 3.5 hours of an overwhelming amount of information. We learn so much in one day because the classes are so long…I don’t know if I’ll be able to retain it all. But it was pretty fun because everyone is at the same level…everyone is an international student, so there are Norwegian, Japanese, Finnish, British, etc. people in our class. Surprisingly me and Joanna were the only Americans (Geneva’s not in our class; she’s on a higher level). I don’t know why that’s surprising. I guess I expected there to be more Americans. Anyways, today was just learning the basics like the sounds, pinyin, and the numbers. Most of the time we’re just repeating what the teacher says…not really practicing it. I guess you can’t really practice stuff like pinyin though. Maybe we’ll start practicing dialogues with each other when we start learning sentences.

So after class we and the moms went to Wanda Plaza for lunch and to do some shopping..my mom needed to buy a luggage to carry some of my stuff home and me and Joanna wanted to buy a English-Chinese dictionary. Then we went to the Fudan bookstores and stuff, because we couldn’t find a good English-Chinese dictionary (we never found one). But we met a girl at the Fudan bookstore, and she noticed we were trying to learn Chinese. So we started talking to her (well, my mom started talking to her) and she agreed to meet with me and Joanna to teach us Chinese while we teach her English. Her English is pretty good though…we’re going to need a lot more teaching from her. But yeah, so we kind of have our own personal tutor. That’s pretty cool. Her name is Raintree. HEHEHEHE. Anyways, I’m excited to try to practice talking to her…she seems really nice, and she said she has nothing to do this summer until school starts so she’d like to meet with us.

I’m starting to miss home a lot…I really like it here, but I’m getting so sick of not being able to understand anything. It’s hard going out all the time and spending most of the day outside of the room, but not being able to talk to anyone…I mean, I can talk to Joanna and Geneva, but it’s not the same. It’s like I’m craving for other human interaction…which I can’t get. I think also I’m getting really tired of Chinese people. Yeah. It’s different at home, where everyone is Chinese-American. I think that makes a huge difference. I think I just need a break. But I won’t get one for the next 3 weeks…sigh. I miss home. I want to just relax for one day…just stay in bed one whole day. Or go to Disneyland. I haven’t done that in a while.