Tuesday Feb. 17th…
Today I only had one class. This is a very nice change of pace from the class schedule that I have while I am at Purdue. The class I had this morning was my Heat and Mass Transfer class. The students that helped us get settled this last weekend are in that class with us. The class is pretty evenly split with Chinese students and foreign students. The professor is from Portugal, but his English is very good. I was told from an older grad student on campus that he has been at SJTU since 2002. Also in our class is a German exchange student. He lives in our building so it is nice to get to know some other people from around the world other than the Purdue group.
After class we went straight to lunch. It was definitely rush hour in the dinning hall. It was crazy busy. People everywhere. Most people were waiting in line for food. Other people were trying to find a place to sit, which is virtually impossible during this time frame. And then 15 minutes later the whole place is virtually dead. It all happened so fast; we hardly even knew what happened.
After lunch one of the Chinese students came back to the dorm with us to help us register for classes. At SJTU you must register for classes online (that makes sense, we do that back at Purdue) but it is all in Mandarin. So for exchange students like ignorant Americans who are not required to learn another language, this system becomes very challenging. Thankfully the Chinese students have been nothing but great help so we showed them the classes we were taking and we gave them our student ID’s and they registered for us. Hopefully everything went through J Also the Chinese students brought us maps of campus. I cannot get over how helpful they have been. They just go above and beyond to make sure we are settled.
Since we were done with class for the day Caitlin, Kevin and I headed to Auchen. It is about 5 blocks outside of campus and it is the Chinese version of Wal-mart, although I have heard that it is a French store…so who knows. You can get everything you need there. They also have a food area so it is one stop shopping. Caitlin and I were looking for some things to finish making our room feel like home. We ended up getting some small rugs, a few stands to put things on in the bathroom, some cups, some notebooks to go to classes with…a bunch of little things like that. Somehow, just like in Wal-mart, the time just flew by. We were in Auchen for quite some time before we had to leave and make the trek back to campus with all of our purchases.
When we got back it was dinnertime. We went over to the dinning hall. The night after that was pretty low key. Just hung out and talked online with some friends back at Purdue.
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