Yay! Another fun day. I’m wondering how else to start these blog entries. Everyday I just say, “Today was fun.” Also, my thoughts are very scattered today and I’m exhausted so my brain doesn’t work right now. So this entry is going to be less organized, but bear with it. Anyways. Today did the usual..went to class. We learned the sounds and pinyin again. Nothing new there. Afterwards we went out to lunch with our diverse group of friends again. Different set of Norwegians this time though. Afterwards, me and Geneva came back to the hotel, but Joanna went back to school. There was an optional lecture on Chinese calligraphy that we could go to, but it didn’t sound interesting so me and Geneva didn’t wanna go. But Joanna did…and it turns out it was ALL IN CHINESE. HAH. I made a good choice. Anyways, that was a good afternoon…I came back to the hotel and did a lot of studying, but still need to do more.
At 6pm, me, Geneva, and Joanna went over to Katie’s apartment to eat dinner and hang out. She cooked us dinner! It was delicious. And it was NOT soaked in oil for once. She cooked us bell peppers stuffed with Mexican rice and meat, with a cucumber & tomato salad. MMMM yum. And for dessert we had grilled peaches with yogurt and honey. It was yummy. I think I’ll start eating grilled peaches from now on. Surprisingly it was good. It sounds kind of weird, but it’s pretty good. After dinner, we listened to a sermon by Tim Keller on the gospel. He talked about how we live in a meritocracy, and we try to find justification in earthly things. Like parents find justification for life in their kids, students find justification in grades, athletes find justification in winning the gold medal. Stuff like that. It’s like, we’re so caught up in these things because we want to find our worth in life. Like what we’re proud of about ourselves that makes us feel justified in living. I’m not explaining this very well. But anyways, I guess they’re kind of like idols. But they make us feel like we have worth, so that we don’t suck at life basically. So he was talking about how we need to release this feeling of needing to prove our merit, and realize that G has provided us with the justification for living. So then I started thinking, what’s my justification? I don’t know. It seem slike a lot of things. But then, I don’t know what the difference is between finding justification in it and just being proud of it. Or maybe there is no difference. I don’t know. We talked about that for a little bit. I think there is a fine line, but it’s hard to determine where some things fall. Like baking – is that my justification, or am I just proud to do it? I don’t know. That’s a difficult question. Oh, we also talked about forgiveness. This was before dinner though. I think a good point Katie made was that forgiveness isn’t just a one time thing. You make the choice to forgive at one time, but then it’s a gradual thing. You have to slowly break down your pride and forgive the person. Like after an argument, you always want to show that you were right and prove that the other person was wrong. But instead, each time that opportunity to prove you’re right comes up, we have to humble ourselves and just forgive the person. I don’t know if that made sense. She explained it a lot better. Anyways, afterwards we hung out a little bit and came back to the hotel.
Then Uncle Wu & his family came over. They brought me and Joanna some food. They’re so sweet! They brought us watermelon and some soup. They’re too nice…they keep taking care of us, even though we can’t even communicate with them. The only way we can communicate is through Michael, whose English is still kinda limited. But we still get by. They’re so cute…I wish me and Joanna could do stuff for them too, but we have no idea what to do. Shucks. Tomorrow they’re taking us out for tong bao (soup & meat bao). It’s supposed to be really good, and I’ve never had it, but Joanna has. So Uncle Wu is going to take us to eat it tomorrow.
Tomorrow we’re also going shopping with Jessica and Kelly (2 girls from the previous program, but they’re still here for an internship). We were supposed to go to the Shanghai zoo, but there’s supposed to be a typhoon this weekend, so we didn’t want to risk getting stranded at the zoo in the middle of a typhoon. Plus, Katie told us that the zoo is very…different. She said that when she went, she saw a lady spilling grape juice on a lion. And the animals’ dens were just disgusting. There was just no respect or consideration for the animals at all. So I’m not sure I want to go and watch animals be abused either. Very sad.
I am VERY tired again today. After studying, I fell asleep for 2 hours, but I’m still tired. I think I need to use this weekend to catch up on my sleep. And also my studying. Chinese is such a hard language to learn…it’s so hard for me to get the intonations right, and I’m getting kind of frustrated. When I talk, I have to repeat the word several times to get the tones right. So it takes me like a good long minute to finish a sentence. Very frustrating…and it’s just so abstract. I don’t understand the structure of Chinese sentences, if there is any, which, so far as I can tell, there isn’t. Sigh it’s very frustrating. And I am trying to learn as much as I can, so I make myself do a certain amount of studying per day. Like I have to do one lesson in my class textbook, and I do one lesson of my writing workbook, and I listen to one podcast of Mandarin lessons, and I write each character 10 times, and I make flashcards, and more. I think that may be too much though. I never seem to have enough time to finish it all, so I get really frustrated with myself. Especially because it’s so much that I’m not absorbing it all, so I feel like I’m not retaining anything and it frustrates me. I guess it’s never been this hard for me to learn a language, that’s why I’m so frustrated all the time now.
Sigh. Very tired. Need to sleep. Oh, I found out that downloading songs is legal here. Makes me very happy J I’m going to be downloading as much as I can before I go back to the US.
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