Today was the first day that seemed to be routine. I finally feel like I am getting into somewhat a groove. I still have some problems to solve such as finding a solution to the incredible heat here so I don’t have to change clothes throughout the day (although we do have AC in our room) and finding a CBC atm.
I woke up went to class, came back took a nap, and went to the soccer field with my 7 dollar pair of total90′s. A didn’t take a picture of them until after I wore them and the field here just destroys shoes. They were originally white. The temperature cools off quite considerably at night and the weather was nice for soccer. It took me awhile to get in a game, but I eventually got in one. I played a bit better today, and started things off with a pretty nice goal from probably 20 yards out. I was very disappointed in my conditioning though and it will tak
e a while for me to recover from this 5 week cold that just won’t go away. (I am still coughing, but have decided I am well enough to start training again.)
After soccer I poked around and juggled with a few guys and then went for a 3 mile run on the track. I am still amazed with all of the activities around the soccer field and track area. As I mentioned before there are people doing the three leg race in groups of around 8 (which I guess is a Chinese tradition of some sort),practicing dancing, running, playing catch with a baseball, soccer,there were guys walking around with ping pong paddles but I have no idea what they were doing, older women walking around the track backwards, and people practicing random drills. It is just a very lively area.
The other amazing thing about this area is that it does not really shut down with the sun going down. Some people will still do things such as soccer in the dark. This is especially true of the people playing basketball. Basketball is even more popular than soccer among the students and there are still a few games going on hours after the sun has ceased to be seen.
I ended up finding a new restaurant on campus since I missed the canteen hours for a late dinner after soccer. It took me a long time to order since you actually had to say what you wanted and you couldn’t just point. I was determined to eat there though since the food looked very good. The cuisine consisted of mainly meat and some vegetables such as broccoli kabob style on wooden sticks, all heavily spiced. Eventually I called my roommate who can speak Chinese decently and found a random student and handed her the phone. The girls here seem to really get a kick out of me struggling to do simple things such as order food. She helped me order some food that contained chicken as per my request.
There was a young girl who seemed to be in charge of the little restaurant and would shout orders very loudly and with a slightly angry tone when the orders were ready, but when my order was ready she brought it out to me myself. There are some definite perks to being a foreigner here.
After dinner I ran into a group of students from Purdue who had arrived on Campus yesterday. They were not engineers and were only here for 10 days only and said they didn’t really have a real course but still would end up with 3 credits. They were very intent on finding a place to drink on campus so we didn’t talk too long, but there is a chance that our groups may go out together this weekend.
That pretty much wrapped up the main points of the day. Fill in the gaps with studying and laundry and you have my Monday.
On a side note: I added some pictures to the Shanghai Day tour from my roommates camera. There are some pretty good pictures including more of the cute kids who wanted to take pictures with us.
The Pictures can be found here: http://picasaweb.google.com/Tom.J.McCurdy
or www.tinyurl.com/b0otpics for short.
