Hello My Friend, We Meet Again

February 10, 2009

10th Feburary 2009

Today I wanted to talk about one of my recent habbits that I’ve started to form since I got home. I find that I go to bed later and wake up later in the day. This is fine since I never really have any obligations the next day. I’ve slipped into this habbit because late at night is the most appropriate time that I can chat to my Chinese friends online. There is a 2.5hr time difference between Adelaide and Shanghai which means that the time when I usually go to bed is the ideal time to chat with my friends in Shanghai.

I did this a lot in China, spending 3-4hrs each night, most nights chatting to my friends that I’d met previously that day. Now even though I’m back home, I can keep this tradition up and its quite warming to do so, since I miss my friends dearly.

While I’m chatting I usually do other busy work tasks in the background which involve some sort of practice, so the chatting part is a great motivator to get me back on the language treadmill again. In fact, considering that many of my friends went back for the holidays and I don’t really have anyone to physically meet and practice, it’s ideal.

I also need to see how I go phoning my friends as well. That’ll come in due time.

Posted in Life | Comments (0)

I Sit and Wonder

February 5, 2009

5th Feburary 2009

Three weeks after my homecoming I’ve decided to re-launch this blog into the stratosphere and umm yes a new design will be coming. So there’s a pinch of promise for you.

I mention the three weeks specifically because I was originally planning on booting this baby back up as soon as I got back home. Use it as something of a notebook to record the experience of plugging back into another culture, while at the same time filling in the gaps of my trip from the past couple of months.

There’s been a few things that have gotten in the way of that and I want to use this post to quickly talk about them and the the intents of this blog as I plan on shifting the direction a little.

For starters I should say that the reason why I stopped blogging back in November is more or less because I found myself a lovely Chinese girlfriend. This means two things, the first is that I simply don’t discuss relationship matters (that is any friend-friend or otherwise) here and hence threw it all on tempory hold while I figured out what to do. I always seem land myself in hot water by talking openly about people in public forums – that has almost nothing to do with her though, more so other people I think. I like to talk without restriction but I also need to be more concious of what I am saying too.

The other reason is because during the second half of my trip I was so very busy. Waking up at 7:30am, go to class, finish class at 1pm. Then have lunch with classmates/friends/girlfriend(predominately) and then spend time with them throughout the afternoon, until tea time in which I may or may not have tea with someone before arriving home to Auntie (yay!) at about 6-10pm to begin homework and cross between MSN conversations with the people I spent time with that day, family and friends from home. This all concludes sometime after 11pm, with the whole day spent speaking Chinese. It was exhausting but wholly satisfying, I loved it.

And as it would go I didn’t have time to write about all of this, instead micro-documenting it all in my rainlendar desktop calender. The information to that has all been lost since I moved to Linux and moved back to Windows in the first week back. Another reason for the hesitation.

I basically figure that all of my ideas regarding the two countries, people and so forth will come slowly over time. I want to use this blog to try and get a better handle on those ideas as well as for general use and the backlog too. Considering the lack of formaility, I’d also like to use this space to be more experiemental with my writing and to basically write about something when I don’t really feel like writing about games all the time.

By all of this, I mean there should hopefully be less information dumps of what I do and more so about what I am thinking. Blogging is handy like that as I’ll go onto explain sometime later.

Thanks to the new Verve album; Forth, for injecting new ideas for titles.

Posted in Life | Comments (0)

« Previous Page