Emy's Chronicles in China

Hi hi

Today you actually get to see me angry about something. 8D

The Internet in mainland is complete trash that never works and when it does, it crawls like a slug and refuses to load sites heavy with coding. Or something. I highly recommend Hong Kong or even Taiwan over this because 1) they have wifi that is still occasionally free and 2) the wifi is relatively fast and 3) every site will load.

I found a VPN from another student and now the China firewall is gone. 8)

Still can't use my laptop. I did all of my placements today and will do my posts later regardless of if I fix my computer issue or not.

:DDDD My laptop got fixed. It was a small issue, I think. Only cost 60 RMB which is less than 10 USD. Tomorrow the language pledge goes into effect. I only got into the second level. Which is the lowest level but. The people in third level have like six years of Chinese. I have two. *stares forlornly*

BUT I looked into if I could do some extra curricular activities. Calligraphy is definitely offered. And maybe Mongolian/Cantonese if a student volunteers. I'm at Minzu University which is known for having every one of China's minority groups around. And also, apparently it's possible to find music lessons around so I might try for a guzheng, which is a Chinese zither.

This is assuming free time is not a myth.

So yesterday, we all took the language pledge and met our teachers. There are fifteen teachers and twenty seven students. We're mostly speaking Chinese except for the outcasts still speaking English. Most people have gone out to Tiananmen today but I'm just staying in the room because I've been there like four times already.

Wow, I totally ignored this thread. But well, school is school, what can I say?

I'll be gone Thursday evening, Eastern Standard Time, because they're literally taking us to a village in the mountains or something. We get to spend something like three or six hours on a bus all day, I don't know. It wasn't really clear which it was.

Okay so, I'm usually a bit slow. But now I'll have to take longer because last week, I got four mosquito bites on my legs which got infected because I scratched at them and they caused a chain reaction, awakening all of the old mosquito bites that I had gotten in Taiwan. The ones which I had thought were healed. So I am currently covered in about twelve mosquito bites which are lovely and swelling and also spreading out like a rash.

It's awful and I've been complaining about it for a while now and I'm sorry for the people who have had to put up with it. I've been putting a crap load of stuff on them but it's hard and walking just irritates them all. Sleeping is uncomfortable because I don't have any bandages (they told me it would hinder the healing process), so my bed smells like medical cream.

I have lots of homework, itchiness, cramps, everything is probably infected, and tomorrow I need to go and spend the evening with my host family.

;; Sorry guys, it's just been a bad month for me.

Also because I'm starting to doubt if these are really mosquitoes or what, the link below is what my legs currently look like. They're pretty gross and disgusting so don't look at them unless you're really curious because. It's awful.

I went to the hospital yesterday and they gave me three types of medicine: cream to use two to three times a day, pills for the morning, pills for the night. I think they're working but I still have ugly patches everywhere. They just don't look as angry. But they do look infected because I can see the places where there is fluid. And it's pretty much my whole leg.

I think I might have taken the medicine wrong. That or I fiddled too much last night. The teacher recommended that I elevate my legs or something so that I didn't mess up the sheets because I was worried about that. But after using all of my books as leverage, my legs were still touching. So I gave up after like an hour or two. This morning, though, I took the daytime pills and I'm thinking I was either too tired from last nigh or I mixed the pills up because when it came time to go to class, I managed two out of four of them before the teachers sent me back to my dorm because I was that out of it.

Even going to class, though, I was almost at the lobby when I realized that I was still wearing my bath slippers instead of real shoes. I think I was late to class though? Yeah, I think that was today. Because after I got back to the dorm, I just slept for three hours straight so it's a bit surreal to think about the morning right now.