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.