Yesterday I accepted another proofreading job, this time for actual pay though. If you are a native English speaker in China, preferably British or American, then at some point, if you accept, you will end up proofreading someone's thing. Now I am working on proofreading a 60 page master's thesis but I have previously proofread resmes, speaches, and short reports. As a general rule, the students who studied abroad or are in a master's program have better English then students who have not studied abroad or are undergraduates. Most Chinese, regardless of university standing or whether they ever left China have very good English spelling. Still, it seems like many Chinese make similar errors in written English: tensing is often a problem, they often over-write, certain more complicated but basic English words like "the" or "a" are used wrong, and some Chinese have problems with English sentence structure. I believe that most of these issues come from the differences between the Chinese language and the English language. Overall though, most people think their English is worse then it actually is. Sometimes though you get a three page document that just takes hours to review, while other times you read over a document and wonder why they even asked you to look it over. Now I am off to enjoy my pay, cash and dinner.
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A little while ago I complained about the internet speeds in this fun fact post. I have discovered that ECNU's dorm internet is actually worse then I thought, but for other reasons. At ECNU, each dorm room has their own router, hooked up to their own cable box (a very slow one just FYI), having its own WiFi network. Though what ever IT guy set up these networks should actually be fired. I found these in room networks to be totally unsecure, and I hardly know what I am doing. I don't even want to know what someone more knowledgeable then I am could do. I guess my best advice on what to do for students is simply do anything that requires security on a VPN, connected to the base ENCU WiFi (because that one actually has some security even though it is hard to connect to in the dorms), or using Tor (which oddly enough I found worked better in my dorm than my VPN). My advice for the East China Normal would be to treat their network more like how Juniata treats theirs. The network should push any user without a secured device into a cordoned off remediation network and should require a username and password to connect to the network in the first place.
After dinner one night my friend wanted to buy some stuff from the little convent store on ECNU's campus. He ended up getting nothing, I ended up getting a seltzer and these cookies, so it goes. I mean after all, they are totally from Denmark and Danes seem like the kind of people who would know their way around butter cookies. When I got back to my room I discovered that the cookies aren't Danish, they are Malaysian and Chinese, this fact though actually made me more excited to try the cookies. To be honest, they weren't bad; they are not the worlds greatest butter cookies by any stretch of the imagination but they were perfectly acceptable. If you have strong memories of grandma's Christmas butter cookies then you will actually be horrifically disappointed with these cookies. My biggest issue was the cookies had a really strong artificial butter scent that makes everything small like cheap butter cookies when the box is open. They also don't preserve well at all, I had some the next day and found them getting kind of stale, and I even kept them in the box. I really don't know what I was expecting, they cost less than 2USD so as long as they were edible I guess they would have been good. I don't believe that Westerners who know what butter cookies should taste like are the target market for ZEK Denmark Style Butter Cookies though; I believe that these cookies are primarily targeted to middle class Chinese who can afford to spend 11RMB on cookies and who want to look prestigious and Western. Being that they are in the campus convent store, I believe that at least some of the wealthier students can afford to buy them, at least when they are trying to show off.
Last week in my Globalization and Urbanization class we took another fieldtrip, this time to the still unfinished West Bund area. The West Bund is kind of like Thames Town in a way, it is built for significantly more people than are actually there. Unlike Thames Town, I believe the West Bund has more of a chance at being a success. The Shanghai municipal government is trying to make the West Bund an art and finance center, frankly it seems like they are defiantly doing that. The only things that are actually really open in the West Bund are a few fancy restaurants and a massive number of privately owned art museums. I previously went to the Yuz Museum to see the OverPop, Andy Warhol Shadows, and the Audemar Piguet shows. I found the Museum a bit too modern for my taste but the Warhol show was interesting just for how much of the same Warhol print they had in one place. The Audemar Piguet show was also kind of fun. The museum we tried to get into on this trip, the Long Art Museum, was actually horrifically expensive and did not offer a student rate so we did not end up actually going in. Walking around along the river was still fun though, just because it is so rare you see barely used infrastructure on the scale that exists in the West Bund. I can recommend actually going to the West Bund, although it may be more fun to go in a few years it is defiantly still interesting now.
A potato and beef stew, 土豆跟牛肉炖, I got for dinner a few days ago at ECNU's canteen. Like a lot of potato dishes in China, it does not sound very Chinese but ends up tasting pretty good and very Chinese. Interestingly enough though, potatoes seem to be treated more like a vegetable than like a starch here. Today is election day for East China Normal University since apparently the University itself gets a seat at one of the lower levels of Chinese government, I think ether the district or county level. Classes still ran for both the international and the Chinese students even though the Chinese students had to participate in the election process. From what I gathered from my Chinese friends, the professors and some of the upper level students run an election to elect one professor to represent the University. While it does not seem like a super big deal, I didn't hear about the election until the week before it was going to take place and it takes 20 days to get the results because the results aren't really that urgent, it does seem more serious than Juniata's student government elections, where I was the only candidate standing for the office of Sophomore Class Treasurer/Sophomore Student Senator. While China has a reputation for authoritarianism there actually seem to be several legitimate candidates running for the office, my friend even said that two candidates could be considered the leading candidate. I would take this with a grain of salt however, I fully believe the Communist Party vetted all the candidates before the election and would be at least OK with any of them winning. Furthermore, because of the way the Chinese government is structured really radical candidates, even if they can get elected, can be put in positions where they have no power very easily. Still, the my friend's ballots all looked prettier than any of the ballots I have been given both in New Jersey and in PA.
Yes, Qingdao makes a stout, but, unlike base Qingdao, I don't believe it is exported at all. While it is a bit more expensive than base Qingdao (a whole 3RMB more) I suffered the cost just to give ya'll a good review. It should be noted that I have not really drank other stouts so I can't really comment how Qingdao's compares to another stout. What I can say is that I didn't like it at first but as I drank more it gradually grew on me. If I had to describe the taste I would say it tastes like a really good mocha, kind of chocolatey and coffeey but not overwhelmingly so. It does have significantly more taste than regular Qingdao though. I also found it felt more alcoholic then normal Qingdao, though I read that this is just a thing with stouts; still it felt more alcoholic then the 3.6% alcohol that it said on the can. To be honest I am not sure why Qingdao and only Qingdao makes a beer that is not your typical Chinese beer. While all the beers in China are good, the Chinese are remarkably unadventurous with beer, even with the Chinese's infamy for adventurous food, so most beers taste kind of like Qingdao. Qingdao stout is a refreshing simply because it does not taste like regular Qingdao. If you are in China and ether like stout, are looking for a distinctly Chinese beer, or are just sick of Qingdao I can recommend Qingdao stout. I went to dinner with one of my exchange partners to a hot pot place in Global Harbor Mall. While it was very beef based I am not sure what parts of the cow I ate tonight. They did show the chefs slicing the meat in the window, I guess to encourages you to to come and to show the cleanliness of the place. It apparently worked, when we left there was a one hour wait and my exchange partner told me she has waited even longer to get into this hot pot place before. |
AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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