Monday: 10/01/2011

First day of classes!!! Woohoo. I guess more accurately “first day of class” as I’m not taking Chinese 101, so I get to skip the second 3-hour class 3x/week. Either way, I was awake from 5:30-6:30, slept again until 7:30 and then woke up to go work out. We were kicked out of the weight lifting area (my large rugby-playing friend Phil Moore) by a troll-man that must live under the stairs. He kept yelling and pointing at a sign entirely in Chinese characters as if we would understand that better than what he was speaking. Either way, we ended up running about a mile on the track and doing dips and pull-ups on these parallel bars they have next to the track.

There were tons of people doing tai-chi and other interesting warm-up moves all throughout the turf in the middle of the track. I hope I’m still as active as all these old people are when I’m their age.
Class was cold. There isn’t any central heat and we couldn’t get the heater or projector to work. We spent 2 hours talking about what concrete observations each group will make for our projects (my group of five includes David Keefe, Paddy Dutton, Bryan Lane, and Jacob Fritschle), which is transportation for us. If you want to see pictures of all the people in this program, scroll down a little bit in . Transportation here is crazy. We’ll be talking about mopeds, walking, bikes, crago bikes, cars (the cars tend to be really nice), subways, high-speed rail, and taxis.
I slept most of the day after class was over, but ran into a Purdue student named John Hermes who has been here since September in the dining hall for dinner. We ended up catching a happy hour with about six other students at an english pub with great beer on tap, and then a random chinese bar with mediocre beer in bottles. I learned a lot from John’s stories about the past few months and ended up staying up way too late, but it was worth it.