Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Life

Opps! It has been soo long since I have blogged, not so good. Anyways, I cannot believe we are more then half way done with our trip to China. This has been going by so fast and every moment has been so much fun. I have finally started to make a lot of progress in my research and I am starting to get a lot more comfortable going places by myself. Before I was not so confident in going to the grocery store and other places by myself because of the language barrier but I have started to pick up on a lot of things and I have become really comfortable with living in the city. I finally feel like I have established a schedule here and that I have a daily routine almost everyday. It is still hard to believe that we leave in less than a month. As excited, as I am to go home and see my family, I know I will definitely miss life here in Beijing.

These past couple of weeks have been somewhat relaxing and fun. Most of the time people would not associate research with being relaxing but it really is not so bad at all. Once you get to know the people in the lab and become comfortable working in the lab, going to work everyday becomes fun. My experience so far has led me to feel that the labs here are a lot more stress free and friendly then the labs back home. People do not just come in at 9am and leave at 5pm; working in the lab is not just a job but rather a big part of their life. People go to lunch and dinner with the people in their lab and also stay in lab late into the night. Sometimes they do not even stay in the lab to work but just stay to talk and discuss things together. The atmosphere in the lab is really relaxed but also there is a sense of hard work and time constraints that does not let you get to relaxed. Basically work has been great and it will be sad when I have to say bye to the students I have been working with because they really have been helping me a lot!

Since our trip to Qingdao I have not really gone anywhere outside of Beijing. A couple people took a trip to Hong Kong and Shanghai but I unfortunately could not get off of work to go. During the week I have little time to do anything but go to dinner with the other people in the program. During the day we are all working and in the evenings we are all usually exhausted. I usually come home from work and meet up with a few people to go to the gym then grab some dinner. Occasionally we will watch a movie or just hang out in the courtyard. There is a lot more time to do things on the weekends. There is soo much to do in Beijing, once you learn how to use the subway you can go soo many places. The subway will take you almost anywhere and the getting there is not that bad at all. Last weekend a bunch of us took the subway to this area next to a body of water, we rented a boat out for an hour and just cruised around. It was late in the evening and the city was surrounded by bars and other areas with lots of lights, it was really fun. This weekend was a lot more laid back. Last night instead of going out a couple of us walked along Chung Fu Lu (the major road we live on) and just went shopping. However, this was not ordinary shopping it was shopping amongst the vendors. There are soo many great things and the best part is you can always barter-which took me a while to get comfortable with. It is still early today so we will see what the day holds in store for us!

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