Balancing ideas and delivery

Ok....2nd day at Shanghai.

HAha...still new and refreshing.....I took my chinese placement test today....I think I'm definitely in this very awkward position....I can read chinese, and so probably got all the multiple choice questions correct....I did really well on my oral (just happenned to know what to say).....but flunked all writing whatsoever.......I think if there were 20 fill in the blank questions....I probably filled in one. Not bad eh?! HAha. Man, I'm such a yank over here its unbelievable. There was this question I didn't even know how to do until I asked the examiner (I had to fill in the accent thingy on top of the pingyin)....

The dining hall here is definitely a change too. Hehe, they serve in those steel trays just like they do in prisons. Its pretty decent food tho, they have a huge variety of all these random chinese dishes...a small dish would cost 2-3yuan/2-3HK$/0.25US$....definitely cheap as hell from where I'm coming from. Not bad at all. Haha, the taxi meters here don't like to budge here either. A ride to the incredibly clean awesome looking downtown is only around 25 yuan or so. I can definitely get used to this lower standard of living.

Played bball today. Some of the ppl here are incredibly nice. I was asking this guy from the soviet union (yes, he can speak very good mandarin) where I can play bball...and he was just like 'You want to go play now?'. Yep. So i met him back right after we got changed and went to play. Simple as that. The level of basketball here is definitely pretty weak tho I must say. Theres no much hustle around here...and the china men here generally don't take the game seriously enough. They don't play mark their man, they just play continous scrimmage games. All in all, it was fun though.

Good enough for now. Hopefully I will take the time to keep up the blog.

Erik.