20.1.08

New school life

School started on thursday and I moved into the dorm the night before.

I live in a double room and my roomate is an American girl. I can't say whether I like her or not because our communication is almost none. She rarely stays in her room. I have lived in the dorm for three days already but every night I slept alone. She always goes out late and she just chooses not to come back if her friends don't give her a ride. To be honest, I prefer not seeing her in the room. My roomate has a television and she loves to turn up the volume. It is annoying to me as I am very sensitive to loud sound. Even when we are both in our room, we don't talk to each other. Our conversations are only limited to "hi" and "bye". If she doesn't make any noise, I may forget about her presence. I have heard of many cases of roomate problems before. Yet, for my case, we have no arguments because we just don't chat.

Living in dorm is acceptable. The food is edible and I manage to eat much food every meal. However, my dorm is a private one and everyone knows that it is a "party dorm". My room is located opposite to the elevator and it is very noisy. I can hear people shouting or banging the door in the middle of the night.

I still haven't ompletely adjusted to the American English. For the past two days, I was lost during classes sometimes, especially I came to school in the spring semester which was the middle of a school year. I felt upset on the first day of classes because I didn't know anyone in the class and I couldn't seek for any help. Fortunately, on the second day, I met some a few freshmen and schoolmates and they were very nice and helpful. And I started to enjoy my school life in university.

15.1.08

Orientation (2)

One thing that the USA required all the international students to do is to have a tuberculosis (TB) screening. For the health centre at my school, they use TB Gold blood test instead of X-ray as the TB test.

In my memory, it was my first time to take a blood test. That was definitely a "disaster". The foreigners always think that I am really skinny. On the day, when the nurse pulled up the sleeves of my T-shirt, she immediately said, "Oh gosh! Such a tiny hand!" She then tied my upper arm of my left hand with a rubber band in order to engorge the vein. However, my vein didn't bulge out and the nurse could hardly see the blood vessel. Then she tried with my right arm and it was slightly better. A very small blood vessel appeared. Again, the nurse said, "And such a tiny vein!" Finally she injected the syringe into the really tiny vein. I didn't look at the syringe and I didn't know what was happening until I suddenly felt great pain. I started to wonder if there was something wrong because there was also another student in the same room and I found that her blood was drawn within a few seconds while mine took so much time. I asked the nurse, "Done?" I turned around and the I saw the nurse frowning. She murmured, "I'm sorry, honey... I know that's not nice but your blood has stopped coming out and I only got a few drops...." She started to draw as much as blood as she could as she wanted to prevent me from taking the blood test again. It got really painful and I almost wanted to yell. I ddin't measure the time that the syringe was injected to my vein but I estimated it to be around 30 seconds. I suffered and at the same time, the nurse was having a hard time too. It was worse that I was asked to take the blood test again. I was then taken to the laboratory. The staff of the laboratory let me lie on a very comfortable sofa. This time she could get an adequate amount of blood. Afterwards, she gave me a few kinds of cartoon bandages to choose from. They looked really cute actually but I thought that I was too old to get a bandage with a cartoon character on it. Therefore I answered, "Uh... I think I prefer the normal bandage..." At last, she did give me a normal bandage but she drew a rabbit on it......

My right arm was quite painful throughout the whole day. There was a bruise with two "holes" on it. To some extent, I really looked like a drug addict. I have never imagined that taking blood test is totally an "nightmare" to me.

13.1.08

Orientation (1)

First post in 2008.

I can hardly believe that I have been in the USA for one week already. The semester break still hasn't ended and school will start on next thursday. We had orientation programmes for the past few days. Before I went to the USA, I always thought that the orientation programmes in the USA universities are very crazy. However, when I attended the orientation at my school, I found that it was not too bad. We had lots of things to do every day and they were not very exciting.

There were many students from China. Probably more than 1/3 of the orientation participants were Chinese students. I could hear Mandarin all the time. On the first two days, I felt quite happy to meet so many Chinese students. However, later time, I got to feel a bit annoyed because they didn't talk in English at all. The main reason was that their English standard was lower than other international students. They preferred making friends with students from their own country and of course, they communicated in Mandarin. I found that my Mandarin has improved a lot, but not my English. It was really ridiculous. Sometimes, the mainland students didn't understand what the speaker said and they asked me to translate for them. I never thought that I had a chance to be my mainland friends' "interpreter". That was another type of language exercise for me.