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Good lord. I have to do a survey for my final year thesis and let 300 dutch people in the upper years of highschool fil it in and after one day I'm at 30 and it's tiring and I have 6 days left before I have to compare the answers with eachother in my thesis and ugh
Two Weeks (Almost) In Qingdao
Two Thursday ago, I arrived in Qingdao at about 2 am. After a few days of trying to get over jetlag. I was finally able to start discovering Qingdao.
For those of you who don't know, Qingdao is located in Northern China, in the Shandong province (home province of Confucius, what! what!) and is known for two things that are very much related: 1) its beer, Tsingtao, 2) used to be an old German port - which means its by the ocean. Naturally because of the second thing more than the first, I was excited to be able to live in Qingdao for 6 weeks.
My internship partner found us an apartment in Hong Kong Gardens, which is right in the middle of Qingdao's business district, meaning there's lots of things to do around our area, and lots of food (although food in this part of town is naturally more expensive). Another interesting fact about Qingdao is that there is a very large Korean immigrant community, meaning lots of Korean restaurants, two feet from where I live (clearly a positive way to break my kimchi addiction :P).
My internship has gotten off to a slow start in the last two weeks, because we have to make some minor (well, sort of major!) changes in the project, so we'll see how it keeps going. The people in the organization, though, are really cool. The other day, they took us out for 青岛小吃 (Qingdao speciality snacks), which included a lot of seafood. I taste starfish (surprisingly delicious), sea urchin, sea cucumber, and lots of shell-type foods that I don't know the name of. They also had this small 摊子 (stand) of more strange foods like snake, scorpions, bats, silkworms etc, etc, so I decided to be adventurous and try some fried scorpions, or maybe some kind of bug, not really sure what. Anyways, it wasn't half-bad; it was fried, I'm pretty much under the impression that anything fried tastes good.
Being in Qingdao is definitely a very different experience for me. This year, I've always gone places to travel or to study for a semester. I haven't stayed anywhere for so long for a non-academic reason. This also means that I don't have the academic setting support that I'm used to having in all the other places I've been. Figuring out the city and navigating has always been really easy for me, but the social aspect will be a little more difficult. I'm also in withdrawal from not studying Chinese characters, but I'm trying to read a little more in Chinese to compensate for lack of 听写s.
Speaking of reading a little more in Chinese, I'm currently trying to do some more research for my thesis, which in the Chinese department at Midd, is a literature-related. I think I'd like to do something like that, but I'll also trying to figure out how I can fit Chinese Buddhism into that somehow. There's a lot out there, but its really just about narrowing it all down. At least, I live right by a bookstore named 书城.
I hope that after these four weeks in Qingdao, I can build a quasi-life (if that makes sense), feel that I've made a real contribution to my internship, and finally figure out what I'm doing for my thesis (and whether, in fact, I am doing one.
Another picture of Qingdao for ya:
