大陆 - Mainland

Tomorrow we head off to Guilin, China. It's located in Southeast China hopefully not too close to all of the floods that are happening. It's about a 13 hour train ride away. It's a relatively small city in China only 1,340,000 people live there. It's well known for its scenery. After Guilin, we will head to Shanghai and spend 5 days there. We are going on a few corporate visits, so I will get to try out my new suit that I bought here. We are also getting two full days at the Expo from 10 a.m. - 10 p.m. When we return, I will have all of a day and a half to get ready for classes that start on the 6th. I'm a little worried about what my roommate will be like. I'm also incredibly worried that I may get placed in a 3 or 4 person room with constant Cantonese that will make me go crazy. Also here is an interesting article I found on China's economy:

夏天才开始 - Summer Finally Started

I've been meaning to make this post for awhile...Friday, we finished up our summer classes. For my morning class, I didn't have to do anything because I had already made my speech on Thursday. In afternoon class, we had to take a mock BCT(Business Chinese Test) which was pretty hard. Earlier in the week, I had two speeches on Thursday, an oral test on Tuesday, and a written test on Monday. It is sad that the morning class is over and that some of my classmates are leaving Hong Kong. Fortunately, a good number of them are still going to be here, so I will be able to see them next semester.

I haven't been doing much since break got off. I figured I would start learning Korean since I now have a lot of Korean friends. Yesterday, we went to Lamma Island. There are two ferries you can take from Hong Kong Island. One goes to a populated side, the other goes to a fairly deserted side of the island. We ended up taking the second one. We hiked for about 30 minutes to the beach. At the beach, it had a great view of a factory behind us. After swimming for a little while, we hiked to the other side of the island and ate dinner at a Lebanese restaurant, but we only ordered pizza. I'm really enjoying the time off.

Just a recap of roughly how many new words I learned this past summer. If we assume there were 40 new phrases per lesson (conservative side), and we learned 15 lessons that's roughly 600 characters from morning class alone. I can tell that my Chinese has improved significantly over the past few months while my English gets worse and worse >_<.

日本菜 - Japanese Food

Friday night, we went to a Japanese restaurant with about half of our class. The two Japanese guys in our class ordered us a bunch of authentic Japanese yakitori(kebabs). I ate some crazy stuff like cow tongue, chicken butt, and chicken heart. It was all really good. Of the weird stuff, chicken heart was probably my favorite. They said next time we would go to a sushi restaurant. They paid for my meal because they said I was not old enough to have a job, so I didn't complain.