Wednesday, August 15, 2007

I'm home now!

During the last few days after finishing work I spent time shopping and we went back to some of our favorite restaurants and places from the trip. We spent some of the time cleaning up the apartment before we left and packing our things. About three days before leaving I was really excited to go back home, but then on the last day I was feeling sad about leaving. I had a ton of fun in those last few days, and I think that was because all of us were off of work so there was nothing left that we ever really had to do if we didn’t feel like it.

After making it home, I am sure I want to go back sometime as soon as I can. I think the next thing I’d do is maybe return to focus on studying Chinese language, at least for awhile before doing anything else. I feel like I need a little more of a foundation for learning the language before I will be able to learn quickly just from going around and interacting with people. I definitely had a lot of fun though, and I am really happy that I went.

It’s not as strange of a feeling to be home as I thought it would be, at all. I kept thinking, ‘wow, how weird will it be to speak to everyone who speaks English again?’ but really it took virtually no time to get readjusted to being in the US. I just still feel like the places we spent all of our summer at aren’t that far away though… as if I could just return quickly if I wanted to, despite it being almost 24 hours of travel time away.

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Poster Session

Last night was our joint poster session with the group of students from PKU who are at UM right now. I thought it went really well, everyone gave good presentations, and Wei Wang gave an excellent final presentation that was a great way to end the night (or morning in Ann Arbor). We had a really nice room here at PKU in which to view the presentations. There were three separate screens, one so we could see the other students in Ann Arbor, one for the poster being displayed, and one so that we could see what the other students were seeing in our room. It was a really comfortable place to have the presentations, and I was impressed with how well it went.

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Last Week Here!

I can’t believe it’s our last week here! The work in the lab is slowing down and I’ve just been spending most of my time preparing my poster for the presentation and taking it easy. I think it’s going to feel weird to go home at first, but I’m looking forward to it. Brian and Tiffany and I have been eating at some new places that we hadn’t gone to earlier in the trip, and getting some last shopping done. It’s been raining a lot though lately so it’s not really been ideal for going out too much. I think we’ve got a lot of cleaning to do this weekend, our apartment is kind of a mess and we’ve been putting off cleaning for the last couple of weeks because we knew we’d have to do it again at the end anyway.

I keep thinking too about how when I get back home everything is going to cost more again, and I feel like I’m not going to want to buy anything because it will all seem so expensive compared to everything here! In China I can get a good meal at a restaurant for $3 or less pretty much anywhere! I dread having to go back and pay American prices!

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Tiffany's Birthday Celebrations

This week I feel like work is getting kind of boring… I don’t have that many experiments left to finish up, and the ones I have left each take awhile to run so I have a lot of free time. I can’t believe the trip is almost over though and that we only have about 10 days left here! The past three weeks have gone by really fast, and I don’t really know where the time went.

We went out on Tuesday night to a Mexican restaurant for Tiffany’s birthday. It was on the other side of the city and while we were getting there we walked through an area that has embassies for a ton of other countries. There were a lot of guards around at all of them and we found out we aren’t allowed to take pictures of them though. After dinner we went shopping in a really big mall and we had wanted to go to an outdoor market we heard about but it started raining so we headed home instead.

Wednesday was Tiffany’s actual birthday, and so on Wednesday we all went out with her lab to a karaoke bar/restaurant and her lab had gotten her the biggest birthday cake I’d ever seen. Afterwards we got some pizza while we waited for another huge rainstorm to pass by so that we could go get a cab go get back home. It’s been raining a lot here lately.