Day #44
Funds: $6200ish
Location: ... SISU Guesthouse ... STILL ...
Michael should really get started on the next essay now that the first essay is finished.
Those of you paying attention to my funds track may have become a little confused by some discrepencies. While it is possible to live relatively cheaply in China (Shanghai being one of the pricier zones) my figures so far may have been a tad misleading. Somehow I managed to miscalculate my annual leave, which was a nice surprise since it turns out I UNDERestimated it considerably. I don't think I'm getting any more money from Casey Cardinia though, but still, I'm a couple hundred ahead of where I thought I'd be when I planned this out. I guess, I still haven't bought Christmas presents, and SISU kindly gave us a teeny stipend to cover the rise in cost of accomodation (250RMB each, like $AUS60abouts) of course this didn't cover the huge difference caused by the market crash everyone's over sooking about, so I'm really surprised the money's been sitting this quietly. I've mostly stuck to my 150RMB/day thing pretty strongly, which is easy enough since 20 kuai ("bucks") for a decent meal is about average, and this course has mostly left me a bit too knackered from sheer crappiness.
It's not really an intensive course by design, it's just the year's course at Monash, crammed into days instead of weeks. I have completely lost the ability to sustain interest in certain classes. And the content of our textbook ... ugh. Amanda Chan, if you're still keeping up with these entries, we're doing the exact same texts as you did. I even remember you mentioning an argument with somebody about the silly man who let his woman go to save face.
Mostly, it's the same chapter, over and over. No new grammar, which is what always gets me excited (don't judge me!), even though it's not like we know everything there is to know about Mandarin morphosyntax, just a list of new words. Every (artificial) dialogue in this book centres around the premise that Chinese people are super-awesome, super-polite friendly people who could never directly say anything that could even slightly offend their apparently terribly sensitive friends, and white people are pretty ignorant and come from a fairly empty culture, since all the foreign characters always need basic concepts explained like "the teacher saying your handwriting could be improved means he WANTS you to improve your handwriting!!! He's just too polite to say so!!!" To this, replies the white man in my book, "ohhhh. Shit. I completely ignored that and assumed my essay was awesome. How foolish of me! How wonderfully intricate is this elaborate system of ettiquette!!!"
Have I mentioned I loathe our textbook? The teachers are wonderful though. Our guy is really animated and enjoys making jokes and physically acting out words that he has trouble describing using other Chinese words. My tutor is as adorable as a 12 year old and is really patient with me and all my little oddities. She's more than willing to just sit and have a chat (in Chinese of course) about pretty much anything, so I have brought up absolutely everything I could think of to avoid The Book. Usually I just bring up Chinese culture that I'm at least vaguely familiar with (today we had an argument about whether Qiao Feng or Duan Yu was the best character on Tian Long Ba Bu, Qiao Feng being the manliest mo'fo ever to appear in a Wu Xia drama, Duan Yu being a dumbarse pretty-boy prince who tends to find out an inopportune moments that his current love interest is actually his half-sister). Sometimes I have to go to other extremes, once I found myself singing Qiu Ai Ge (the first song I did at my 21st ==") to prompt her into singing for us and another time played Love For a Thousand Years (very popular Chinese song) on my flute to stall - although to be fair the flute was with me cos I had to go to Miranda's straight after to practise for the Christmas Carols.
Oh the carolling, it was awesome ^^ Photos and locales are together on facebook, it was a good night. Miranda is really good on her guitar considering she's not even been playing a full year yet. Lenny, Sue Kim and Eric came with me, it was Miranda's church group's thing but the four of us Monash kids made up nearly a quarter of the group hehe. Church people are so nice and so much fun around Christmastime ^^
Doing essays with Monica (think Michelle Chew only slightly lighter and classier ... but not by much) is a BAD idea. Combined, we have the attention span of a single caffeinated squirrel. That has A.D.D.. We tend to take several hours to do a couple sentences each here and there. Essays with Lian, however, is a GOOD idea. Her Chinese is really good and she's really good for bouncing ideas back and forth with. Problem is, Monica and my behaviour seems to keep driving her to politely leave us to do her own essay elsewhere =[
So many characters on this trip ... argh I could never do them all justice in a silly little blog. There's something really weird about seeing the same people every moment of every day, it's rare to even get more than a single hour to yourself, even when you sleep there's another guy lying two feet away usually. It's not like people are clinging to eachother or anything, it's more that we just don't want to miss anything. I wish I were capable of doing what Quincy does, which is when he feels like he's sort of had enough, he just ignores everyone and if approached, stares at the floor and says in a vaguely apologetic tone: "I'm not ... socialising" XD
Lots of silly little gossip too. Me and Monica are enjoying the idea that there's rumours going on about us cos we usually hang out and have noticed people noticing. Sunday night we had another failed essay-writing session that saw us in bed at 7am and so we both just gave our essays to Lian to hand up and went to bed ... people did notice and comment on the fact that we both skipped class on the same day, which we find hilarious. (Although the teacher was more focused on the fact that I was probably dying from hypothermia or something, apparently she said something like "Well I hope he puts on a jumper from now on!") I look forward to hearing what certain people are going to make of me when Joy shows up IN A MERE SEVEN DAYS.
Merry Jingly To All! Doubt I'll get another blog in before Christmas, although I'll definitely have more photos put up soon.
Oh and tomorrow's my big night, me n Marcello gonna see what we can do. Starting to feel a bit nervous hehe. Hopefully I'll have that video up for everyone soon too.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
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1 comment:
I'm still reading. :) The 7/8 text is simply ridiculous. If you're going on to 9/10, the stories are a bit better - they're more "traditional Chinese society is super gay" than "WOW, ALL CHINESE PEOPLE ARE 1337!".
Merry Christmas Michael! Get crunk at BonBons for me. :)
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