2127 4-17-10
Well I finally skipped a day, sorry about that. I got home to late last night and had to wake up early the following morning so I just didn’t feel like writing the blog this time. Sorry I know you’re probably devastated.
Anyways so yesterday I went to work. We redefined our objectives and I’ve been sent on a slightly different direction, focusing on just one market and only one market. From there we’ll use that as a bench market for the rest of the markets. Fun stuff.
After work I grabbed some dinner and was joined by the German kids, Simon and Filiz. They have to do projects for their school, which is their big grade thing here so they haven’t been able to go to Chinese classes either. Projects seem to be going well but I got the feeling they were feeling a little home sick.
Once dinner was over I hung out in my room for a few minutes and then it was off to Louie’s House warming party. The gang had bought a ton of beer, but I really hate bear, and luckily so did Yierm so we found some good stuff at the local store, she even introduced me to her favorite Korean alcohol. With the goods in hand we caught a cab and headed for Louie’s pad.
To be honest the place was pretty sweet. Set on the 27th floor his apartment overlooked a nice portion of the city and was rather spacious. He pays about 2700RMB a month for it, and shares it with two other roommates. I’m not sure if that’s like 2700RMB a piece or is that a total amount.
Overall the party was fine, just kind of hung out and listened to music. It’s weird I feel like these French kids party a lot, but in America we party… “harder” I guess. I mean there parties are pretty tame compared to what I’m use to in the States. I was a little angry that Luc tried to make a move on Yierm while she was drunk, I mean it’s one thing if it’s just some random girl at the club but like a friend? For me that crosses some sort of line there.
That pretty much wraps up my Friday.
8:30am the next day I was on the 1st floor of my building ready to head to the park! It took us a little while to actually get there because our group moves really slow (what takes me 20mins to walk it took us an hour). But we more or less arrived at 10:30am at the Century Park station.
The park itself was great. The weather was perfect, I got some sun, and we set up a small plastic blanket and played Uno for a while and had snacks. But I had my camera and soon I was off by myself exploring the park while the others just hung out.
Honestly it was the most fun I had had in a long time. I got out in some great weather and was just taking pictures of everyone I could find just doing normal things. I think my idea was this: I often feel like my friends and family think of China as this far away place with people in it that they can’t relate too. My experience here is that in fact the Chinese are almost exactly like us, and even if they do things a little differently or come to different conclusion about things the fact of the matter is we’re all human, and that was what I was trying to capture. I suck at photography, but that’s besides the point. I also tried to get a little bit of the scenery as well, but people were my main focus.
Nathan and I left a few hours early, we had heard of this place nearby that served burritos and we were dying to try one. In all honesty it wasn’t that good, it was way too over stuffed with rice and not enough cheese, but when you consider the fact that rice is super cheap and cheese is really expensive it kind of makes since. But
Nathan and I did have a super good conversation which was worth it.
We talked a lot about previous girlfriends and such. What we liked, what we didn’t, swapping stories, and bitching a little bit. We are actually really similar in a lot of ways so our experiences in a lot of things are very similar. His mom is like a self made real estate investor who’s done quite well, and he himself took an interest in investments before he got sucked into learning Mandarin which gave us a lot to talk about as well. He sucks at directions by the way, which I’m kind of happy about because it gives me some way of being useful.
Another nifty fact was that growing up, he was heavily involved in this mega church in Florida. But then around the age of 16 or so broke away because he began to see the techniques they use to get money and convert people were really manipulative. Now he considers himself an atheist and in many ways breaking away from the church, he feels dramatically changed the way he tackles things because he felt like he had just missed out on a large portion of his life and now that he’s free he’s trying to desperately catch up by doing everything he can possibly do, which is a large reason why he wound up in Shanghai and how he got so good at Mandarin. Obviously his tales about growing up in a mega church were supper fascinating to me.
Alright well now it’s getting late, I’m still trying to upload the photos but I’ll get them posted asap.
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