Sick Today
So it turns out my hay fever was not allergies at all. I am sick. Quite sick. I was in bed for about 16 hours from yesterday until this morning. Thankfully I had the foresight to cancel all of my classes this morning so I can spend the day recovering and generally being a lazy sick person. The down side is that at some point during the semester I will have to make up the classes with my students. Lame.
Aside from being sick, I had my first Chinese lesson yesterday. Despite my sneezing, coughing, nose blowing, and general wheezing it went surprisingly well. I blazed through the first three chapters because most of the stuff I had already learned during my time in graduate school. My tutor was surprised at how much Chinese I already knew and kept saying that my pronunciation was very standard. I guess standard means good. I hope.
For the time being I’m not going to bother learning the characters. It’s just too much effort and too much time wasted when A) I’m paying for the lessons and B) survival Chinese is really all I’m looking for right now. I suppose somewhere down the road I could make a career combining my Chinese and my Engineering knowledge, but I can’t plan that far ahead. That just wouldn’t be my style.
That’s all for now. Since I canceled my classes today, I have to at least try to be productive. Go go gadget … get stuff done! On my way back from my lessons yesterday, I saw some men working on a new building that will probably never be used:
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Get better — linked to you in my blog — why will the building likely never be used?
You have a blog? What’s the URL?
Because it’s China and that’s what they do. Pretty much any where you go you will see new buildings coming up, really fast. In the outskirts of Xi’an I see new buildings coming up in seemingly random places. For some reason the Chinese are very poor urban planners. In Chengdu we were told by some of the locals that all the pretty new sky scrapers around us were completely unoccupied.