These first three weeks have seemingly thrust me back into life as a college student. Our 'rooms' I've discovered can best be described by the word 'dormitory'. We live in a dormitory for faculty. My 'hall' is all UCD faculty who are here teaching for ICB. It is interesting getting back into the swing of 'college' life...but it is also fun (I'm also the youngest in my hall...so that makes it kind of funny that we are all reliving our college days). We often leave our doors open and go back and forth, in and out, trading movies and food, etc. We knock on each others doors and gather friends to go with us to the cafeteria, walk to the store, or even our new favorite place...the faculty lounge. We live right in the middle of campus and hear music blaring out the lunch and dinner hours here (noon and 6 p.m.). I study my butt off in order to prepare lectures for my class (Calc III is a new prep for me...and harder to teach than most classes because it has a 3D visual component that is REALLY hard to portray on a 2D blackboard)...and root like crazy for the weekend to come! So all in all...it is like I'm living 1999 over again, but this time I'm determined to enjoy my freshman year of 'college' a little more :-)
Today we discovered a great perk of being faculty here...the faculty lounge. So the college I teach at (ICB) is a smaller college right in the middle of a very large Chinese University (Chinese Agricultural University). So we have most of our buildings very close together. This is very true in the fact that I live in the same building as my office (wow...that is an amazing perk...you just can't beat the commute!), all the administration offices are in the same building...and now we have discovered the faculty lounge which is on the roof of the same building.
It is hard to tell from this photo...but this is on the roof and the left hand side of the photo looks out upon the campus of ICB. There is a great breeze up here (and again...I am perpetually hot...so the breeze is amazing!) Then inside the faculty lounge is a mecca for ping pong players. Two ping pong tables (which are each carefully covered to protect them...tons of paddles, ping pong balls...and even a divider so you can play tournaments and not have hinderance from the other side. We played a few matches today...to assess the field. Here are Enoch and Chris in an epic battle.
Chris won with sweet shots like this...
Which of course...was not staged at all for the camera.
After table tennis we decided to all get together and go out for dumplings tonight...I hear that karaoke may be on the agenda for after dumplings, if so I better run try to get a little nap in.
Zaijian,
Gary
That lounge looks nice!! What is ICB?
ReplyDeleteICB is the International College of Beijing...it is technically the school that I am teaching for. They award University of Colorado Denver degrees though...it is kind of weird...but the College here is called ICB and it is located within a really big China school called Chinese Agricultural University.
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