omg so busy!
plenty of stuff has happened, classes have started, etc. too busy to blog. have cellphone and bike. maybe I'll write stuff down this afternoon.
what has happened since may 5? well, that was a saturday. sunday I think we met the other cohort. was that the night we went to the pub? alcohol was tourist-priced, around 30 kuai a drink, although there was a lot of whiskey in the whiskey. didn't feel good that night. monday was our last free day. I forget what happened that day. maybe that's when I bought a bike. tuesday kinda sucked - long day of classes, I felt sick, then we had to go registern'stuff and I felt awful, went right back to my room afterwards while everyone else stood in the burning sun talking... when I felt well enough to get up, I didn't know where anyone was. slowly found people, spent some time complaining on irc about the day sucking and it being my birthday.. then I was gonna go watch something with jon and tina but pete reappeared and I spent some time with him, which was what I really wanted, so my birthday wasn't so awful after all.
wednesday we only had one class... then... I think that day me and pete lazed around for a while, eventually went out for a bike ride.. I had to turn back to meet ivan to go get a sim card, but when I got there I couldn't find anyone and everyone's bikes were gone, so I thought they'd left without me. I went to both china mobile places looking for them, then came back to hte dorm, sulked for a while, and went out and got a sim card myself. I got lucky - there was a guy in the campus store that could speak some english, and explained the plans to me :) so I got one that had what I wanted. larter it turned out that ivan's friend had been really late or something.. I dunno where ivan was waiting, never saw him. anyways, iirc I was going to go buy a phone, but didn't get around to it, and then we went out for dinner with a bunch of students, to some real fancy place by xihu (west lake). the peking duck was nice. the sashimi wasn't bad either - of course the salmon was farmed and not nearly as good as BC stuff, since we're not close enough to the ocean, but the wasabi was damn stong :)
thursday was another long day of class. I was feeling sick and was late for the one class where we had a quiz. missed the first 5 words. urgh. after class I think I went out to wensan lu and bought a cellphone to put my sim card in, and some speakers for my laptop. I think I got ripped off a little but not too badly - gotta practice this bargaining thing. :) there was one point where I almost walked away from the cellphone, and now I think I should've. :)
after that... I think that was the night we discovered that the supposedly spicy restaurant actually had quite mild dishes, and some of them were realy nice.
friday we again had just one class. me and pete went to go read books outside in the shade... it really wasn't much cooler than the sun. darn humidity. I'm really glad my room is on the first floor - it's always a lot cooler than other people's rooms. only used the air conditioning once so far.
friday afternoon we had to meet up with some of the studdents from the chinese side of the ddp program. basically we get paired off and we're supposed to go out and do interesting stuff with them and learn about china and then write about what we did, except it was explained as this big scary "report" thing. xie laoshi wants us to talk chinese with our partners, which took a hell of a lot of energy. we still can barely communicate... we need the parctice, but it's hard not to just fall back to english. after that we had a fancy dinner with some comp sci teachers and important-people. I found it prety awkward. a lot of the dishes were creepy seafood, and I was doing unusually badly with my chopsticks. the beer probably didn't help with that. some of the food was quite nice though.
saturday morning we had to get up really early - we were supposed to meet at 7:20am to get on a bus... it was a big field trip with all the ddp people to something vaguely like a theme park. it was a long way away - first a half hour drive to zijingang to pick up the other students, then an hour's drive out to the middle of nowhere. we rode in wobbly little ox carts over to a bunch of bamboo rafts. they had a video of people going down rapids and getting sprayed by water that made it look exciting, but the water was really quite calm. they sold cheap rain jackets and pants to keep dry - the raft surface was barely above the water so I figured I should get some pants to go with the rain jacket I'd bought on campus. I'm glad I had my own - it looked as thin and cheap as the ones they were selling, but it was still in one piece for the whole ride, whereas the pant I got had ripped right after I put them on, and one of the guys tore his jacket even before getting on hte raf they were also selling lots of water pistols...
for most of the ride we just drifted down the river, watching the two rafts in front of us have a water fight. one guy on our raft had bought a bamboo water pistol, but it broke, so I picked up the tube part and managed to get a note out of it. I wanted to try punching holes in it to see if I could get other notes, but I figured I should just leave it :) it was wet and the water here isn't exactly clean. besides, pete bought a real flute on tuesday.
there were two man-made slopes in the river, which weren't very exciting, but did get the front row quite wet. it's a good thing I had those pants, because the water came up maybe 6 inches above the floor of the raft as we went down the slope. since I was in the third row I din't get splashed much. however, they did have this silly thing near the end of the ride where there was a dragon statue on each bank of the river that shot water out. we were given big hats to shield ourselves with, which was good 'cause only a few people had brought umbrellas. our raft almost crashed into one of the statues - we were so close that I basically ducked my head and held up the hat as a shield to keep stray water away as we went right under the main stream of water.
after the raft ride we found ourselves at the amusement part area... there was a bit of a playground, which the chinese people seemed to find far too amusing (do they not have playgrounds for kids here? the closest thing to a playground I've seen in hangzhou turned out to be full of exercise equipment for adults) and some interesting attractions. there was a hot air balloon that would take two people up to look at the pretty view for a minute, a strange bouncy thing where you were basically attached by a harness to some giant rubber bands and shot up into the air (shocking and exciting - I was too surprised to try doing flips like I saw some other people doing. was afraid of hurting my neck too), an archery range with a bunch of hens and other birds where apparently you could take home what you shot (creepy!) and various other games and amusements.
jon and one of the guys from the previous cohort wanted to go up in hte balloon together, but the operator said that they were too heavy, so I got to take jon's place... and it turned out we were still too heavy. :) the other guy wasn't overweight or anything, he was just a big tall guy. we landed just outside the roped off area, they pulled us back and jon took his place - I got to go up again. the scenery was quite nice, but after the crazy bouncy thing it seemed a bit boring :)
after that we had to walk allll the way back to the bus, and then went to a restaurant nearby. most of the food was kinda lame, but it had really, really good chicken. afterwards we got back on the bus, and it took so long for people to decide whether they wanted to go back to the theme park or home or somewher eelse that a minute after the bus finally started moving, I needed to go to hte bathroom again. that was a looong ride home.
sunday I finally didn't have to get up... but I woke up at 7:30 anyways and couldn't get back to sleep. I miss my bathroom now; shaving was annoying in the shower here, and the soap scum was circling the drain for ages.. the showers here are really silly. the whole bathroom floor is flat, more or less, and there's a drain between the shower and sink that really doesn't work very well. the bathroom floor is lowered maybe 2cm - just enough to keep the water otu of the rest of my room. since the floor's not perfectly flat, and doesn't slope towards the drain either (if anything it slopes *away*), there are puddles around for ages after a shower.
anyways, the day got off to a slow start with the evil distracting irc. I finally read some of my email, too. then I went out and got food at a cafeteria we found yesterday (there are loads on campus but we've only found three so far) and managed to get a meal card so that I could buy food at the second cafeteria - it doesn't take cash. after that tina and james wanted to buy bikes, so pete and jon let them ride n the back of their bikes to hte bike store. after dropping them off, me and pete went to hte bookstore and got some cool stuff. there wasn't as much manga as I'd hoped, though. either it's not very popular or I'm looking in the wrong places; I saw as many books on how to draw manga as actual manga stories.
after that we were on our way to the bank, and some guy started chatting with pete. turns out he was going to be in some bike race next month and wanted us to come watch. then he was saying some stuff we didn't understan... and then wanted to come back to our campus with us to find a translator. we didn't have time for this and didn't know anyone who could translate anyways (except maybe james T who had his phone turned off) but we couldn't seem to explain this to him. he just kept following us. eventually pete honed up one of the guys from the other cohort and tried to get him to translate, but it seems he just said we didn't want to watch the race (pete actually was interested in seeing it). somehow, after that we finally managed to persuade him that we were too busy today and we'd phone him on the day of the race. then realised that we'd gone too far down the road and ended up going all the way down to xihu and back up :) it was a nice bike ride though - when we got back I wanted to go out again... but there's so much to do... and then I got distracted by the internet again - mainly writing this blog. had a nice big dinner at the caf, and pretty soon I should go find out what adventures tina and jon have had - they only got home around 7:20pm, and it was maybe 1pm when we set off for the bike shop.
tomorrow morning we have to get up extra-early for some health check. oh joy... I hope there aren't too many needles. I also hope it doesn't cost too much - I need to go to the bank. probably should've got money out today, but I wanted to shift stuff around online first. oh, and we have a quiz in class, too, so I guess I should study for that now.
I completely forgot to write about the crazy internet access... heck, there are a million things I've forgotten to write about. I just don't have time to explain all the interesting stuff that happens. I think I got net access on tuesday - no dhcp, static ip (silly networkmanager didn't like this, I had to kill it off before the changes would take properly) and an evil http proxy - all other ports blocked. I forgot to set the auth part of the proxy in kde's settings and was using firefox for more than a day before I finally realised my mistake. took a couple days to get this corkscrew program working so that I could send ssh over the proxy - thank goodness fuzzie's server was set up properly for it. pete's been having more trouble getting ssh stuff to behave. the net access is a fair bit better than the public comps - aptwas downloading at speeds of around 17k/s iirc - but with all the layers needed to get ssh through the proxy, my typing is annoyingly lag. I blame the lag for the huge number of typos in this post. :) at some point we should be able to get some vpn thing set up to let other programs get through the proxy, but we need to find a windoze comp to copy the settings off of, and all those layers will probably bring the speed down again... urgle. it's barely better than dialup :P still, it's nice to have my rss feeds n'stuff again (well, the ones that aren't blocked). er.. I should really go do that homework now.