Day 14- 16: Second Week of Classes and Meetings Galore

The second Tuesday of classes, I had difficulty paying attention to classes because I was very focused on my technology, partially because I was trying to reorganize Astro Club for this spring semester.

In the morning, I rode the bus to Campus A, and went to both Heat Transfer and Prob and Stats. I was taking notes in both, and learning some but I was also preoccupied by many other things on my mind. I went home soon after, getting some milk and fruit yogurt as well. Getting home, I ate the rest of my food from the night before, tried the yogurt from a few days ago,  watched some videos, read, and took care of some other business. The yogurt tasted surprisingly like a sweet Greek yogurt, and I will definitely get it again for the protein and dairy content.

Yogurt on the right: one I tried, and the other one was the one I bought

Video of the Chinese streets

I also had a Skype call later that night with a UAV specialist who works at GE. I was contacting her in order to get some insight into her line of work and to help me with my fuzzy logic UAV research in subsequent semesters.

Wednesday wasn't very special, I simply went to classes (Statics, and later Heat Transfer), riding the bus back and forth from Campus A as well. When riding my bike back home in between in order to pick up some of my philosophy homework, and work on learning some more Python as well, I saw a couple new landmarks that I haven't seen before.

Lunch- Eggplant, potato and pepper dish, cold salad, cold soup, and rice

On my way back from Campus A, my e reader died, which annoyed me, but when I started playing with my phone, the girl sitting next to me asked me where I was from. She asked me several times in Chinese, after which I apologized because I didn't know Chinese. She then asked me in English. I told her Cincinnati, and seeing her confused look, I clarified that that was in the United States. (There have been similar times when we are told what province Chinese students are from and we give them equally clueless looks.) After that, she started asking me more about America, and in turn, I started asking her about China. I started to become glad that my e reader had died. About halfway into our conversation, I heard whimpering, and thinking that it was a baby, I looked around for it. To my shock, it was a dog! I told the girl that in America, we aren't allowed to bring dogs on the bus, but how I love dogs as well. Then she started asking if I had a dog at home (answer:no), and we started talking about our backstories and where we were from.

Right before we got off the bus, I was checking my We Chat, and I exchanged WeChat info with her, telling her that there were 3 more American TAs that she could meet as well if she was interested.
We said our goodbyes, I grabbed lunch at the campus dining hall, and I headed home.

random selfie at the apartment complex

sunset in Chong Qing

Thursday was the longest day so far. It started going to Campus A for prob and stats, then going to our first UC staff meeting. The CQU TAs took us to the nicest dining hall on campus, which had a wide selection of food, from Italian to American to traditional Chinese. It was very far away from the academic buildings, which would explain why it wasn't that well frequented. I ended up getting bacon stir fried rice, a Coke, and some almond brittle (which was really good).

Almond brittle

Then we held our first UC staff meeting with all of the TAs and UC faculty (excluding Pablo, who had a sore throat.) We exchanged ideas about what could be improved with the program, including the phone situation (including selling our phones back to the program to be used for future TAs), the wifi situation, adding students to Blackboard, making sure students are paying attention in class, and fair distribution of workload between TAs. (It was becoming more and more apparent that I would have one of the largest workloads this semester as the sole ME in a program with only ME and EE students....)

Then we headed to get on the subway to get ourselves registered at the police station. In China, internationals must register themselves at the police station within 30 days of entering the country or they can get severely fined or deported. We told the other TAs to meet us at Campus D for additional training, and we headed toward the subway. About halfway there though, Greg realized that they may have been already closed, and headed into a McDonalds. He, Dom, and Nick got their coffee fix, while Jessica and I made plans for a bible study on Sunday, and Will consulted me for statics lectures.Then we headed back to the bus stop on Campus A to go back to Campus D.

McDonalds in China (with a separate coffee and desserts counter on the left)

 After that, we headed back to Greg's office for a TA training. We met another one of the office workers, named Hemia, and she gave us the low down about CQU's rules for TAs. Afterwards, Greg gave us his own take as well. All in all, once we were finished, we had worked 10 hours, and we were all exhausted.

I headed home, eating the leftover fried rice, and finally reaching the halfway point in learning Python, as well as chatting with some friends, and headed to sleep, ready for the end of my second week of my first co-op.

-Zoe