The travels of Justin

For a moment I thought the dog was doing a trick. A mop was hanging from the steel structure in where a small street intersects a nice shopping district around our university. The dog was holding onto the mop with his teeth. I almost expected people to start clapping at the strength and endurance for [...]

I’m sick today. 不好！I missed class and don’t feel optimistic about tomorrow. Speaking a foreign language is hard enough without having your ears plug up so you can’t even hear yourself! In Tianjin I had purchased three sets of flash cards that each have 100 cards to help learn 汉字 (Chinese simplified characters). I don’t [...]

I went to a market today and my bus passed by 8-1 Square (八一广场) where I met a surprising (to me) sight. Military—not carrying weapons, from what I could see—and police officers were stationed at all the entrances to the monument presumably to prevent people from gaining access to the monument — the main attraction [...]

On Tuesday we toured the new campus as planned, but was surprised only by how desolate it was. The school population, as I’ve been told, is about 80,000 students plus faculty and support staff, but many parts of the school are still under construction. Maybe the capacity is 80,000 students. Regardless, the ‘tour’ wasn’t as [...]

For months I’ve been in the dark about many critical issues, including when school starts. It always seemed like the strangest thing to be unknown by a school. Sure, I understand that the Chinese language courses for foreigners are operated much differently than degree courses, and approrpriately so, but I still couldn’t understand why no [...]

“That’s China of the 1980′s,” says the man sharing my train compartment as the train slows to enter Nanchang City (南昌市). Easily spotting the red maple leaf I met Mr. Yan, a Nanchang student who spent 3-months in TRU as an enchange student and was kind enough to be my first contact at 6 AM [...]