Friday, March 17, 2006
CHANGSHA & BEN RECOVERS FROM BEING SICK
After being sick for a week and not having anything interesting occur, I'm now back into the blogging.
I am currently in Changsha, capital of Hunan province with my Chinese friends (and English students) Ada and Harry. They are taking their college entrance exam here and invited me here with them. They are trying to get in to the Beijing Foreign Language University. This afternoon, we went to the school so they could register. There were 200 Chinese people and I was the only foreigner. People kept asking me if I was the teacher giving the exam. I got tired of the question and started saying 'maybe.' Thoroughly amusing how much people tried to suck up.
I was talking to a few of them and they asked me to help them prepare for the interview they have to have in English. They get asked why they want to go to BFLU and why they want to study the language they have chosen. I found out that almost all of them didn't want the language they had been assigned. One boy had been assigned Finnish. He didn't know anything about Finland, except that "they're rich" so he looked it up online. I asked one "why do you want to study Japanese?" The answer? "I don't." That seemed to be the consensus. I helped a little bit, but most of the help will be going to my friends tonight. We're having a big study session.
Changsha is a 2 hour bus ride away from Shaoshan, Chairman Mao's hometown. I'm going on Sunday. I'm very excited. Apparently the town has become a shrine to Mao. I'd like to see the Communist Party Museum there and buy a bunch of Mao hats and little red books.
After that I will be here about 1 more month before I go home. In that time, I will be doing a lot of travelling. Ideally I'll make it to Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Guilin and Thailand. We'll see how far I get, but I will be writing a lot of blogs soon.
After being sick for a week and not having anything interesting occur, I'm now back into the blogging.
I am currently in Changsha, capital of Hunan province with my Chinese friends (and English students) Ada and Harry. They are taking their college entrance exam here and invited me here with them. They are trying to get in to the Beijing Foreign Language University. This afternoon, we went to the school so they could register. There were 200 Chinese people and I was the only foreigner. People kept asking me if I was the teacher giving the exam. I got tired of the question and started saying 'maybe.' Thoroughly amusing how much people tried to suck up.
I was talking to a few of them and they asked me to help them prepare for the interview they have to have in English. They get asked why they want to go to BFLU and why they want to study the language they have chosen. I found out that almost all of them didn't want the language they had been assigned. One boy had been assigned Finnish. He didn't know anything about Finland, except that "they're rich" so he looked it up online. I asked one "why do you want to study Japanese?" The answer? "I don't." That seemed to be the consensus. I helped a little bit, but most of the help will be going to my friends tonight. We're having a big study session.
Changsha is a 2 hour bus ride away from Shaoshan, Chairman Mao's hometown. I'm going on Sunday. I'm very excited. Apparently the town has become a shrine to Mao. I'd like to see the Communist Party Museum there and buy a bunch of Mao hats and little red books.
After that I will be here about 1 more month before I go home. In that time, I will be doing a lot of travelling. Ideally I'll make it to Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Guilin and Thailand. We'll see how far I get, but I will be writing a lot of blogs soon.
