Local time: Sun Feb 25, 21:04

So since my last update, things here at UIC have gone much smoother and I am getting comfortable with the school. Now that I have my SIM card, wifi, bedding, and classes figured out I am less reliant on my roommate for guidance.

My add/drop period to fix my schedule will be this week, and I have some changes to make but overall I am happy with my schedule.

Here are some new people that I have met and hung out with for the past few days:

Andy: Another Concordia student, majoring in Chinese education

Mia: My roommate! She is originally from GuangZhou, so very near here but now her family is in Xi’An (where the Terracotta Warriors are). Her English is pretty much perfect and she’s been very helpful and friendly since she got here. She studied abroad in France last semester so she’s also learning French!

Eleanor: My dorm-mate. She’s nice, extroverted, and I don’t see her much because she’s often out with her friends. She’s from ShenZhen, China.

Dales: My other dorm-mate/Eleanor’s roommate. She’s an exchange student studying at HKBU and from Kazakhstan. She’s very sweet and likes to share about her culture. I also don’t really see her though because she’s exchanging here to UIC with about 9 other Kazakh friends that she spends the majority of her time with.

Vivian: My first friend! She’s from Vietnam and an exchange student. Her English is also fluent and she’s super fun! I’ve had lunch a couple of times with her and helped her buy things when she got here.

Winnie: My friend from class. I met her in my Organizational Communication class. She was super nice and came right up to me after class when she heard me introduce myself as being from the US. She told me how she had just did a study exchange in Salem, Oregon at Willamette University this last semester! She thought it was very cool that I lived only an hour or so away from there. We had lunch together and we talk on WeChat.

Avril: Another friend! She’s is in my Culture and Translation class. She is very extroverted, crazy and unpredictable. But she this nicest person ever! She’s from GuangZhou and studying to be an interpreter. She has perfect English, almost fluent in Spanish, and is learning Russian.

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So I am joining the UIC Rugby team. They don’t really have a girls team because its 1. hard to find (Chinese) girls that want to play a sport and 2. hard to find (Chinese) girls that want to play a CONTACT sport. So the four girls that do want to play Rugby practice and play with the guys. Not sure if they get to play real games though. I went to the first practice on Saturday at 8 in the morning. I talked with Tony and mostly observed practice, learned about the game, and practiced short and long passes. I enjoyed it quite a lot and hope to be more active in the practices going forward. There was going to be another practice today at 5pm but I couldn’t go because I was on the Zhuhai day-trip planned by IDO (the International Development Office, they coordinate everything with exchange and international students at UIC).

Today I went on a day-trip around Zhuhai with some other exchange and international students. It started off this morning at phase II campus at 10:30am and we went to BeiShan village. We had a tour guide who was very excited about taking us to his home village. We hung around BeiShan village for a while, ate lunch and walked through some old temples. It was pretty neat! Then we went to New YuanMing palace. It was very beautiful, but almost immediately our first impression was that it was recently built as an attraction. None of the temples felt very real, there was a lot of staged areas for pictures, even the trees in the temple were fake… it was easy to tell that railings and wood were just spray-painted, and so much was plastic or cheap wood. But, it was big and pretty. Then we went to the Zhuhai museum back in Jiuzhou (the museum we couldn’t find earlier before classes started). It was probably the most boring and cold museum I have ever been to. Not a single artifact. Everything inside was big and open with white walls. All there were were images and videos. Some cheap plastic models without any detail, or attention to building accuracy (we found a model with the area we stayed in before school and aside from one main building the rest of the buildings were just random). We had a dinner tonight with the exchange and international students at restaurant in the HuiTong village between campus phase I and phase II. It was very yummy food! I thought the dinner would include more students, but it was only for people who went on the day trip I guess. I was also asked to give a speech at this dinner so going into it I thought I was going to be on a stage in a big banquet hall with all of the exchange and international students. But it was just one small room with 2 big round tables and maybe 15 students? So much less stressful and less formal. My speech went great though! And Joshua even asked after dinner, “are all American’s good public speakers?” What a compliment!! Anyways, dinner definitely turned the day around, though I wish we had also been able to go to rugby practice!

It was good to get out and off campus, explore the city and meet some other students, and learn some history and culture about Zhuhai!

Yesterday was the Lantern Festival, the last day of the Chinese new year! To celebrate IDO hosted a small lantern festival celebration where we watched a lion dance, did some “lantern trivia”, made TangYuan (tāngyuán 汤圆) sweet rice balls with black sesame or peanut in them, ate TangYuan, and painted lanterns! We had more TangYuan today at dinner, and our dorm lobbies even served free TangYuan to us! So yummy 🙂

(sometimes my captions are too long, there is a little “i” at the bottom right of the pictures after you make them full screen that will show the whole caption)