Second Day of BLAST (Language School) Training

• Language School is fun
• It was fun to make mistakes in class
• Our teacher wanted us to say 我吃饺子 (Wo chi jiaozi) which means “I eat dumplings) but everyone heard  我是饺子 （wo shi jiaozi） which means “I am a dumpling”
• Everyone looked at each other and said, “Wait a second, I’m not a dumpling, I’m an American”
• It was just confusing because “chi” and “shi” do sound a lot alike when spoken really fast
• I’m still such an engineer
• We were learning the origin of the character 早 which means “early” and the origin is that the square part in the old days used to be a circle with a dot in it to represent the sun and the cross represented grass
• Well the teacher asked, “Does anyone know what the bottom part meant?” before she told us it meant grass and I said, “Oh it must be the sun rotation about an axis”
• Our teacher obviously didn’t hear me and she said, “yes, it represents grass” and everyone laughed at me, it was a really good time
• Then we learned about the song 小白兔乖乖
• It’s about a guy who wants to get into a house but the little rabbit doesn’t let him in
• Basically, every Chinese person knows it because it’s taught to kids when they are really young as a “stranger danger” song
• So the teachers said that if we ever want to bond with our children then we should sing this song because our kids will know it
• What made it funny was that all the guys sang the part of the guy trying to get in and we all sang it in a really deep voice, “Quickly quickly little rabbit, let us in”
• A miracle for my broke computer
• I now have one screen instead of two!
• Somehow my computer shut down by itself while I was at language school and when I came back I rebooted it and now I have only one screen instead of the split double screen I had earlier
• I still need to get a back-up hard drive
• I’ve tried to use Carbonite which is an online back-up but my computer has been on for 3 days non-stop (except for accidental shut-offs which happened twice) and it’s backed up 20% of my computer
• Then the Carrefour wants to charge me about $250 for a hard drive so I tried to go a cheaper route on ebay but that was no luck
• I've also tried the whole, "Put an image on a DVD" trick but I ran out of DVD's so now I'm stuck with Carbonite and crossing my fingers that it can back up my hard drive before Dell transfer my warranty internationally
• Never tried to use paypal in China
• I have an American paypal and I tried to use it to buy something on Ebay but now my paypal account is blocked
• I don't feel as bad as the guy who I tried to buy a hard drive off of in China who is now waiting for my paypal to become unlocked so that he can get paid
• At least I’m making good use of my food stipend
• I get a reasonable amount of money to spend every day to buy food as part of my TFC language school living expenses and the past two days I’ve been within 1 RMB and 1.5 RMB respectively of the limit
• The only reason why is that at the end of every night I go to Carrefour to spend money on food for breakfast because no restaurants are open that give out 发票 so I now have a stockpile of about 12 packs of breakfast crackers in my room