The travels of Justin

Welcome fellow TRU students and faculty who’ve found my site through TRU World’s “What’s New” page. Feel free to poke around, comment and ask questions, and enjoy some photos from other parts of the globe. If you ever get bored of reading election coverage, visit anytime and I’ll do my best to bore you with something different. Certainly there’s nothing boring about being in China. Even though we have nothing “scheduled” outside of our classes, every day is full. And apparently, clips of me in the audience of the English competition are still being aired every Wednesday and Sunday night, so I’m often being told, “I just saw you on TV.”

Today was another typical day: Woke up. Had a bizzare experience at the Bank of China (very helpful people though, at my branch). Went to my Mandarin language class where our teacher patiently tried to explain advanced dimensional concepts of “left” and “right”, or “up” and “down” (next I know someone will start claiming there’s a 4^th dimension, geesh!). Tried not to giggle at all the “flair” worn by our servers at the Tianjin TGI Friday’s while enjoying a meal ordered from a menu we can read. Walking back to our dorm, we hummed Christmas carols thinking of our Canadian friends and family. They are likely being forced to endure never-ending Christmas music at malls and stores. If I catch a local markets at peak time, I can close my eyes, imagine the irritating artificial store lighting, and push my way through the crowd while imagining it’s Boxing Day and everyone can buy new jeans for CAD$15 or less. Mind your pockets!

I think the only food I occassionally miss is my grandma’s delicious pumpkin pie, but somehow the flavour wouldn’t be the same without the company of family. I’m determinded to find a way to make egg nog though, to (probably) offend my classmates tastebuds and toast to the good health and prosperity of my friends—wherever on this great globe they may be.

Time for sleep. 再见 for now!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 11:05 am and is filed under Life and living, Thompson Rivers University (汤普森河大学), Tianjin, China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.