The Intro

My name is 周真宁(Zhou Zhenning). I'm a 白人，a 男人 and a rising junior at the University of Mississippi who is majoring in International Studies and Chinese. At the request of a 贵朋友 I'm starting this blog to chronicle my time in Qingdao and Shanghai. For those unfamiliar with what I'll be doing for the next year:

First, I will be studying for two months in Qingdao under the National Language Flagship Program's Qingdao program. From June 15 to August 14 I will be having class from 8-12 am each weekday, with one week off for a mid-term sightseeing trip (hopefully not Henan this time).

Second, starting around August 30, I will be in Shanghai until June 2010 at one of two programs. The first is a CIEE program in Shanghai, under which I will attend Shanghai Eastern Normal University and take classes with other Americans. The second is a CSC program which would have me studying at Fudan University with all kinds of international students, and under the financial auspicies of the Chinese government itself (scary). The second one seems like the better and more viable option at the moment, but stay tuned for updates.

So, here is my China blog. As with all China blogs, there will be posts about weird food, crazy customs, taxi drivers, ludicrous adventures while intoxicated or otherwise, nostalgia and
homesickness, and of course lots of pictures of pagodas, seas of people, and toothless old men.

There will also be a fair amount of Chinese peppered in these posts, probably, so if you have Firefox, which you should, you can get a neat little extension called Chinese Pera-kun, which will let you right-click to enable it and the get auto translations of Chinese words when hovering over them. (Incidentally, the name pera-kun comes from the Japanese "perapera" which is like "blah blah" or "gobbledegook" in English, and "-kun," a Japanese honorific for boys. The reason it's Japanese is because the creator first created Rikai-chan, which does the same thing for Japanese. Also, "-chan" is an honorific for girls, which is probably why "-kun" was chosen. The more you know!)


Cheers,
Zhou Zhenning

Nine days left until I leave the US...