Darrol in China
Postings and pictures from China, while studying at Peking (Beida) University in Beijing, China.
Links CSUC IP Program - China | Peking University | Gilman Foundation | Wang Family Scholarship
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September 24, 2005
I called Darrol this morning, using my wonderful ecallChina card (with 15 hours left to go on it!) http://www.ecallchina.com/
It was his late Saturday evening and 7:30 in the morning for me
(Beijing is 15 hours ahead of us.). He has a new number, bought a
new sim card for his phone that has a better rate on incoming
calls. Call or email me if you want the new number. (Also,
if you’d like to call him, but don’t want to buy a $20 card
of your own, call or email me, and I can register your phone number
with my card, and you can then call him, after finding a local access
number on their site http://www.ecallchina.com/access/45_.aspx.) If you have questions, feel free to email, I’ll help walk you through it.
The best time to call him is: Saturday, between 6am and 8am PST
(which is 9pm – 11pm Saturday evening in Beijing), or I’ve
also called on Friday or Saturday evenings between 7pm – 10pm,
which is 10am to 1pm on either Saturday or Sunday mornings.
He sends his love and best wishes to all, and apologizes for not having
been in contact yet. He hasn’t been able to get any time on
line, and if you’ve sent him an email in the last 2 weeks, he
hasn’t read it. Access isn’t what he thought it would
be, but he’ll be working on improving that in the next
week. He just hasn’t wanted to spend $3 for a cup of coffee
to use the internet…
School is going well, he is enjoying his classes, though he has tons of
homework. They are learning 40-50 words a day, which includes the
sounds, tones, Chinese traditional characters and simplified
characters. He has about 4 hours of class a day, 5 days a
week. He said the teaching style is totally different, a lot of
memorization and will elaborate more on that in an update. (Which
he promises will be coming soon…)
He’s feeling better, and got over his flu and acclimating to the local flora and fauna with Chinese herbs.
This last week he joined the Cycling Club on campus (they were
encouraged to join two clubs, so this is the first). Friday they
went on a 25 km overnight ride, which he really enjoyed.
He’s discovered that there are many cafeterias on campus, and at
another campus nearby, with excellent food in huge quantities for about
$1.50 to $2 a meal. So that is where he is doing the majority of
his eating.
And that’s about it. I caught him up on Hurricanes Katrina
and Rita, which he has heard very little about. I sent him some
Time, The Week and National Geographic magazines which he really
enjoyed since English reading material, especially up-to-date is hard
to come by.
Enjoy, Sherry (the Mom)