a random encounter

I can never promise a frequently updated blog, so I might pile things that happened in a few days time in one post. It's already 12:34am right now, I hope I'll be done in a while.

So Day 4 was orientation day. I met some people whom I cannot call friends. We just happened to be assigned into the same group, with me being the only one from the Chemistry department. Touring a campus with such a long history is definitely exciting, not to mention that the campus can be up to 3 times bigger than my home university's. 

After the orientation session, I met another few new friends and made my student card (which I am not too impressed of, everyone seemed to be complaining how ugly the photo is). My roomie and I went to Sliver to try out their vegetarian pizza of the day, which is simply amazing! So the encounter occurred when we were almost done and were preparing to head home.

An old man approached our table asking if we spoke Mandarin in Putonghua. He was holding a stack of Mathematics materials in traditional Chinese and needed some help in understanding the content. I was a little scared to talk to him as it's a common sense not to talk to strangers (ok this statement sounds really weak) but I knew I would be safe with my roomie and the other people in the pizzeria next to us. My ability to translate academic Chinese was not really on par with the UEC students but I did my best. I was invited to play a little game with him before leaving, and yeah I lost all to him as I didn't pay much attention (sorry uncle!). The game involved some coins, and he quoted that I came here for a 'change' orz. We finally exchanged a little information about ourselves; I told him my Chinese surname and he told me his in return, Gao (his last name is Taal, I hope I didn't get it wrong). He claimed that he got hit by something on his head sometime ago and lost his ability to pronounce English fast, which is why he wanted to learn Mandarin so he could teach somewhere else. I'm really touched how one at an old age still didn't lose the motivation to learn something new and embraced all possibilities. When we left our seats some white guys on the next table stared at us in a weird way and I'm not sure why I started feeling uncomfortable about it. Told my family about what happened and got some expected response. I shall anticipate how this semester will turn out to be.

So today I joined some mainlanders for one day at the San Francisco Premium Outlets, and window shopping is still very tiring. I guess it's because the urge hasn't come...

Alright it's 1:00am. Good night all!

W