On Thursday, the American dean of JCI (the program that I work for at CQU) was giving several presentations about the requirements for students to be able to go to UC. The one for the 4th years was on Campus A, and they wanted some of the American TAs to go over there, to sit in and give advice to everyone about UC's campus. Jessica and I decided to go, while Dom and Nick sat in on the models lecture.
When we woke up in the morning at 6, we found out that the meeting was at 10, not 8, so we turned over and slept for another hour or so. We headed to Campus A on the 8:30 bus, and we were able to get there a bit before the meeting started. Dean Orkwist talked about academic deficiencies, the TOEFL test, scheduling for the fall semester, and housing for the students. We were able to give them some advice about UC, mainly pertaining to scheduling and housing, but overall, we were somewhat bored.
After the meeting, we talked to Dean Orkwist a bit more, and then headed out for lunch. I invited Celia to come along, but, truth be told, we had no clue where we were going to eat. I was personally hoping a cheaper place, but Celia showed us a more upscale place with fish soup that we agreed to.
Getting in, it was a similar setup to hotpot, but she made sure it was tomato soup rather than a spicy broth.
Appetizer of dough sticks with the sweet syrup
As we waited, we talked with Celia about what she had thought of the meeting, as well as her plans for when she came to UC. After a bit of time, they brought a bowl of green herbs out, which the waiter ladled the soup over, so it could soak into the leaves.
Jessica and I both made the mistake of trying to eat the leaves, but Celia said that it was just to put the fish and other things in the soup in before you eat them. That being clarified, we started eating the fish. I tried a couple times to put the vegetables on the side in the pot, but I was stopped both times. Eventually I realized that we had to wait on the vegetables to ensure we didn't eat the fish bones by accident. After we were done with the fish, the worker came over, and ladled most of the fish out of the bottom, putting it into a bowl for us.
She talked to Celia in Chinese, and Celia translated to say that the lady thought that we "weren't very good at eating", because we didn't eat much food, and we didn't really want to touch the fish head. We were a bit taken aback by the idea of eating it, but after some thought, I decided to try it. I picked at the fish brain, which looked like overcooked gelatin, unsure at first. But I pulled off a piece, popped it in my mouth, and immediately disliked it enough that I didn't want to have another piece.
Celia went up to the register, and paid with her Alipay, which is an app on phones connected to Chinese bank accounts. We got change from the lady at the register (which was a bit of a hassle) and paid her our parts of the bill.
Beautiful mural on the wall
After heading out around 1, Jessica and I were going to head down to Starbucks to kill time and to use their wifi. I had my office hour at 3:30 for Heat Transfer, and she had Prob and Stats at 7. We walked down to Sanxia Square, and wandered around, looking around for Starbucks. It was a bit of a miserable day. The good weather had dissipated earlier in the week and it was raining heavily (at least heavily by Chinese standards). We wandered for a while through puddles, while people were cowering in doorways, and slipping on non-rain-friendly tiles, and realized we were lost. We got our bearings underneath a staircase, and decided to retrace our steps and figure out exactly where it was. After a bit of thinking, we realized that we had simply gone too far, and that it was a lot closer to the entrance of the square than we thought. Getting inside, feeling like soaked puppies (and wondering if maybe I should have bought an umbrella from one of the people standing outside selling them), we gladly bought our hot drinks, a hot chocolate for Jessica and a vanilla latte for me.
We went upstairs, sitting at a very long table, and tried to connect to wifi. I was having trouble, so I gave up and decided to grade papers, and Jessica eventually decided to work on Prob and Stats problems. We noted that both of our answer keys for the classes were flawed/incomplete, and we agreed that that doesn't help the textbook publishers' business. (In fact, most of the students share digital copies here, so they don't get much Chinese revenue.)
When Jessica decided to use the restroom, the lady sitting next to me asked me about what I was doing. I tried to explain my job to her, but she didn't know what engineering was in English. She was studying some sort of literature, or the Chinese way of thinking, and I found that interesting. At around 3:00, I stopped grading, and headed back to campus so I could make it to the office hour.
The walk was longer than I thought, so I ended up being a bit late, especially because the elevator was taking a while, but there were no students in there, but Pablo, Robert and Suri were already inside. I had asked the Chinese TAs at the meeting earlier with Prof Orkwist if they could help me use the scanner in the office (since it was all in Chinese). It took them a while, but they eventually figured out how to scan it....the only issue was that they weren't able to get the scans onto a flash drive. Even though it was connected to a computer, the scans somehow didn't transfer.
So Robert showed me a scanning app on his phone that he used, and he used it to scan the two papers I had, sending me the documents on WeChat. However, we realized that most phone cameras would be adequate on their own for the job, and I decided to use that in the future. While we were chatting, Pablo was working on various things, but offered us teabags from his hometown, Loja, Ecuador. The tea was called horchata, and it's world famous. It wasn't even close to the horchata water we had had at the Mexican restaurant, but it was a tea made with special herbs and flowers in this town. He said that the teabags were nowhere near the quality of the fresh tea in Ecuador, but I was still excited to try it.
After Robert and Suri left, Pablo and I chatted for a bit about my blog, about my travels, and strangely enough, about our views on Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand's philosophy, objectivism. (The topic came up after saying that I joined the libertarian group on campus because they were giving away samplers of part of her works.)
Around the time I went to leave to catch the bus, Pablo went to walk up and down some stairs, so I headed out a bit after, locking the door behind me to ensure his stuff was safe. I got on the bus back home, and started feeling sick. I realized that the lunch had probably caught up with me, and when I got home, I cooked myself a dinner of eggs and carrots, eating peanuts, Gatorade, a pear, and yogurt as well, to try to get all of my food groups.
The dinner I fixed, and the bag of Horchata tea that Pablo gave me and the other TAs
Friday started bright and early, with a Heat Transfer class at 8 am on Campus A. So I got up at 6 am to fix breakfast and get ready, and then I headed out to catch the bus.
I handed back the two paper copies of Homework #1, and I then took notes for classes, as per my usual. Pablo asked if I could stay to proctor the embedded systems quiz, and I stayed for a bit longer in order to do so. The other TAs were all at the Engineering Models lab on Campus D, but I needed to be at Heat Transfer, in order to take notes and ensure that I could keep up with the class material enough to grade it.
As I was returning from Campus D, I was deep in conversation on my phone (digital conversation, obviously), and thought I heard my name being yelled. However, the conversation was forefront on my mind, and I dismissed it as a auditory hallucination. That sort of thing, with people yelling my name to get my attention, often happened at UC, and I was thinking my brain conjured it to trick me, because hardly anyone on this campus knew me that well. The calling persisted, though, and I turned around in surprise to see Dom, Jessica, Nick, Sean, Celia, and Alexandra, almost all of the people I did know!
They were going to eat, and even though I had just had a PB&J sandwich and half of a carrot on the bus, I decided to join them. We went to the top level of the food court, which I still hadn't eaten at, and went to the sushi place with them. I got an Oreo coffee milk tea, and salmon sushi, with the help of Celia and Alexandra. The tea tasted like both coffee and tea, which was interesting, and the "whipped cream" didn't melt into the drink, hanging at the top, proving it was actually cool whip. The salmon sushi tasted just as good as premium sushi back home though, and it wasn't nearly as expensive as in America.
We commented on Celia's sushi, which had red stuff on top. We were hoping it wasn't ketchup. She said that it was actually octopus, which we all decided to try at some point in the future.
Nick's cup of hot oreo coffee milk tea had a mustache and a red and white background on it as well, which reminded us Americans of the Cincinnati Reds. We told Celia and Alexandra about our famous baseball team, and the four mascots we had, especially Mr. Redlegs, the one with the mustache, and they seemed interested in it.
cup reminiscent of the Cincinnati Reds
We also asked about their worst foods (they said it would probably be hotpot because of all the oil) and what they wanted to do in America when they went in their fifth year. Nick also asked them to write our Chinese names on the board next to our English names on the TA sign. They said that we could theoretically choose our own names (one professor last semester picked a name that meant "Tall, Rich, and Handsome") but we wanted the actual translations. For my name, they put one translation, and then erased it. I asked why, and they said the first one meant Monday. I grimaced at that, and they told me that the second one meant sweet, and I was flattered. They told me that there were often several translations for the same name, which clarified my confusion.
The Americans' Chinese names
After everyone left, I sat in the office, leaving the door shut to keep the heat in, but putting a sign on the door to say that office hours are indeed in session. I started working on questions for the UC advertising lady who wanted to feature me in promotional items to pass the time. The hour and a half passed quickly, and no students showed up. I decided to stay in the office a bit longer and grade some more before going to dinner. I also found out that Greg, our supervisor, may not be back until after the semester was over, which made pay and supervisor meetings be run through Prof Wei Wei, one of the professors who had just come, but who has worked with JCI for years now. At dinner, it was a beef and potato broth, with rice, and the additional soup. After all of this time, I figured out the additional soup was to cool down the spice of the main dish. It really did serve its purpose well.
-Zoe
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