GaoJunlin@VCU

Well, it might be too late to write the experience in July 14th today, but since it was really a marvelous experience I have ever experienced in my life, I have to put it on here now.
It was a day of 36 hours. When people want more times, we often say that ”hope there would be 36 hours a day”, and it did have, because of the different time zone on the earth. The time in Richmond is 12 hours behind that in Shanghai. I got up at 6 in the morning in Shanghai that day and got onto the airplane at about 10a.m. after about a 24-hour flying, we finally reached Richmond at about 10 in the evening, still 14th of July. But at that time, my parents in Shanghai has already got up in Sunday morning. What magic!

The gladding residence hall, the place where we live, is shortening for the GRC. The structure of the hall is very, very, very complicated. The room which I live in is at one end of the hall, the 3rd floor, no, if more exactly, both the 2nd and the 3rd floor. That’s one aspect of what I mean the strange and complicated structure. The door and the dining room are on the 3rd floor, but if we want to get into the rooms, we have to go to the second floor through long stages. It is really new to me because in China, the rooms are usually upstairs. But some of the dorms where my fellow students live are only on the second floor with no stages. I think that’s more convenient, but is not as secure as ours.

The dorms are better in hardware than what I thought, except that it’s so cold even the air-conditioner was shut down at night. Thanks to our warm-hearted interns, the useful facilities in the kitchen are prefect and just leave out nothing required. It’s convenient we live and cooking here.

But few days ago, a group of high school students also moved in here, which really made here noisy. I don’t like them at all and I think they are somewhat dangerous. I hope they may move out of GRC as soon as possible:(

When Phuc first showed us around the campus on Sunday, I thought the VCU campus is really big and beautiful, and I’m afraid that I may lose my way. As time passes and we walk across the campus to take classes every day, the campus has become smaller, but still beautiful, if is not more beautiful. All the buildings in the campus are special and magnificent, esp. the department office houses along one road. Everyone loves them and took a lot of pictures. The same thing happened during sight-viewing the downtown area of Richmond in Monday afternoon. We took the pictures as much as we can because the buildings and scenery was sooooooooooooooo impressive. Everything are different and special, but co-exist in a harmony. I enjoy the campus and the city very much.

Shopping, shopping~~~ Women are born for shopping.

So we went shopping on Tuesday night. Jay brought we four, Ting, Dongyu, Yi and me to the mall(but what’s the name of the mall?!) as well as Wal-mart, and he’s really cute:). We were in such a hurry because there was only 1.5 hours for us shopping in the mall, and I hardly bought anything. Well, to be honest, it is absolutely impossible to have a look at all the shops inside and decide what to buy in such a short time, and there are someone who bought really beautiful clothes with a very low price. So everything I can do now is hoping for the next shopping trip~~

There wasn’t many special things while shopping in Wal-mart. All of us are accustomed to shopping in big supermarkets in Shanghai. But when it turns to the Self-Checkout Machine, I just didn’t know how to deal with it. It’s totally new to me that I should weigh and pay for the fruits and vegetables in this way. But I believe I can do better next time with out guiding:)

The newest and the final book of the Harry Potter series will be sold here in minutes, and my friend in China has already told me about what happened at last, because the issue time in Shanghai was just as that in Britain, 8a.m. in the morning local time. It is said that Harry didn’t die and married Ginny, and named their baby Albus Sirius. How crazy! I bet Harry didn’t die because everyone thought he will, but how can he have a baby in the book?! Still don’t know about what’s going on with Ron and Hermione, but I can only read the book after going back to Shanghai.

Talk about the movie last night. The IMAX dome was really good except that my eyes were really tired. But I don’t like the movie since it changed a lot on the book. Anyhow, I have watched it much earlier than my friends in China.

Here is the middle of another week, which means that I have to do another 5 new entries in my blog. Ok, let it come, let me continue to write. I won’t deny that I spent a fantastic weekend and visited a lot of interesting places in these days, but when it comes to writing blog, especially in English, I feel it can be the end of the world You know I’m a very, very, extremely, absolutely lazy person that I have tried not enter new entries on my own blog on the MSN webpage over 3 months, and at last I gave up and shut it down. But now I have to write, write, and write, even without a laptop and even make these meaningless complains a new entry@-@

It was a surprise that Phuc invited her group to her apartment for dinner last Friday. She asked me right after the class when I was considering about my dinner, and obviously, I had no excuse to refuse^_^. So, with Jiayi, Jenny, and other three students from BFSU, Jia, Yinghe, Zhiqing, we set out~~

The apartment was not far away from GRC and it was really clean and comfortable. All of us who visited were deeply impressed by all kinds of decorations in the dinning room. Phuc also showed us pictures of her wedding, and her husband is handsome as everyone guessed before. The dinner was great! Not only because the kindness of Phuc, and the various of food such as beef, beans and chicken, but also because we used chopsticks to have rice! I really missed chopsticks a lot~~~The last important thing I want to mention is that I love the popcorn in her apartment. The taste is fantastic and I’ve never had so much before as I’m not very in fond of popcorns. But they are tasty! Cool! Magic! I’m soooooooooooooooooooooo lucky that I can meet such a kind intern as Phuc:)

I used to think that Busch Garden is just a botanical garden without much fun simply because its name is garden, and I was totally wrong. But I didn’t realize until I was in front of the gate of it last Saturday and saw lots of roller coasters inside the garden. But all of them look so high and scaring that I was not brave enough to play most of them, except that the Escape of Pompeii was okay.

Of course, besides the roller coasters, there’re still lots of interesting things, e.g. the shows and those countless souvenir shops in the garden. Since it was a funfair with a lot of European cityscapes, we can find a lot of interesting elements other than American style. Europe is an attractive place with so many different nations and culture, among which I love the German clocks and the Italian masks best. We also took a train sight viewing around the garden and finally found than it could be a botanical garden because of the plants everywhere.~~

It has been 4 or 5 days since I was at the Virginia Beach, but I still cannot believe that I’ve seen the Atlantic Ocean and even have swam in it! Although Shanghai is just located beside the Pacific Ocean, I’ve never had chances being there because the seawater there is very dirty and hardly has any interesting scenery. Even if we go to the beach there, we can only see the East Sea and the Yangtze River, and the water is yellow. Well, I’ve also been to the Hainan Island, but I could only swim in the South China Sea. But now, it was an ocean, and I could touch it by myself! How exciting it is!

I love the feeling of relax. The sky and the seawater were blue and the sand was soft. And I loved the sunshine, although I have applied sun cream 7 times that day. Moreover, the food in the restaurants at the beach were delicious, especially the seafood. And I tried Mexican food the first time in Saturday night. But the goods sold there can not be worse. I bought a slipper in Sunday afternoon, but it soon broken when we arrived Williamsburg Monday morning:(.

It’s Friday today and we continue to have lectures since Tuesday. However, everyone is sleepy these days, because we were so tired last weekend and didn’t have enough rest after coming back. Four days passed by and we are still tired. Maybe we shouldn’t attend the evening activities every night, but we really do not want to miss anything that might be fun in the U.S. So day after day, without enough rest at night, everyone gets sleepy in the class, you can see at least one person closes his eyes in lecture time, especially when what the professor said is not that attractive. I know it is not good, and I tried to not sleep and listen to the lecturer carefully, but having an English class for two hours only is rather tiring. Coffee might be efficient, but I cannot have that much. It’s late again now, I’d better go to bed early this night.

We were accidentally announced that our home visit was arranged on Sunday afternoon, so we cannot join the hiking on Sunday, nor we had anything to do on Saturday. But Jay was such a kind guy that he drove us to meet Erik’s group on Saturday morning and we did peach picking and visited UVA together. I know it could be very tiring and kind of boring to him since he grew up here, but he just drove us five here and there and offered us chips on the way back! Thanks to Jay, we had an excellent Saturday!

The peach picking was a lot of fun. And I think it was strange that American peaches are yellow inside, and tastes good of course. We probably ate more than we bought. And I cannot imagine that I’ve eaten two peaches in the orchard without washing! Well, every kind of fruit in the U.S. doesn’t need be washed before eating since they are clean and no insecticides applied. The village view was also beautiful~~

The main campus of UVA and Darden were two exciting places because of the fame, the facilities and the environment there. The main campus was designed by Thomas Jefferson and the buildings and lawns were really magnificent. Darden was rich, was so outstanding that we can only respect. And it was really well decorated and comfortable inside. What a pity that Erik didn’t come with us to Darden~~