9 Days

It's strange, having the feeling of leaving a place that you've lived in for 6 months to resume the life you had before. I think before I kind of described how I felt stagnated here, that things weren't really moving despite seeing all the news and even experiencing the presidential election overseas and the economic collapse. I can't help but feel that only when I get back to Berkeley, to the United States, can I get back to the way things should be and the way that things usually progress.

Anyway, I have 9 days here, 3 more full of class, 3 more full of final exams, and the last 3 for weekend last shopping, seeing friends, and probably a going away graduation ceremony. It should be an eventful last 9 days. I'm pretty excited. But what's also NOT exciting is having to study for these finals, and after seeing the midterms, I know it will NOT be a walk in the park.

To backtrack to the last post I had about snow. Let me tell you: I missed it. I stayed awake for hours, hoping to see it snow. Tammy even woke up at 8 am especially to see it in the morning, but no avail. The sad part was, it was snowing at that time, just such small amounts that it was not noticeable from outside our windows. It was sad. There were students that told us they saw it, because it was an important first day of snow in Beijing, but most people said it was nothing. Very microscopic pieces that only lasted about 30 minutes. We waited in anticipation for the snow to come back because all day on Weather.com and on our widgets it said it was snowing, when it obviously was not. This might be due to the fact that the reader is at the airport, which is a little farther north (may I add, NOT THAT FAR). It was sad. We had waited in anticipation for it, but we were let down by its minimalism. It was very, very sad. Yesterday, we had another spark of hope of seeing this elusive snow (well before January, anyway), but today that too was crushed, it WILL NOT snow on December 20 like it said it would on Weather.com for a short day.

Just to show you what we were hoping for, YEARNING FOR:

A guard in position in front of the Forbidden City. There are always guards here regardless the weather. And no, I will NOT get a picture like this the way the weather is going.

Another shot that is not mine of the Forbidden City during the snowing/winter season.

This is a place in Northern China called Haerbin, or what Americans and other calls Harbin. It's a place that hosts winter festivals every year and makes structures like this completely out of ice. It's amazing, just like the ice hotels in that James Bond movie. We did plan on going here, however the limits of our visas and the change of plans for the date of the finals messed up our plans to go here. After all, it is only a day's trip on a train, which is totally worth it to see this.

In other news, I will do some more reviews of things that I've found on the internet and programs that I've recently come across, starting first with:

1) Mint.com

What a great site, I hear it was named some kind of site for the better of mankind or something, an award that is selectively given to websites. In earlier years, these winners consisted of Google and Mozilla, among a few more. The reason I like it is because it's so simple to use and it allows people, the common lay-people, to figure out how to save their money, where it's all going and how to manage it in ways that would otherwise take a lot of time and effort. It's easy to use and has an Web 2.0 interface that's really nice and friendly (lots of buttons and nice effects). It took me about 5 minutes to get all my accounts on there, and don't worry about putting your information on their to your accounts, they have pop-ups that inform you about how it's safe. But then again, if you're good with your money and know what you want to do, you don't really need this site's help or monthly or even weekly updates on your accounts.

2) ZDT

This program is amazing. Well, I admit it has some flaws, but the function is great. It stands for "Zhongwen Development Tool" and it's made by someone with the intentions of giving Chinese learners a tool that's convenient and really helpful. The basic functions are an annotator that gives pinyin from characters, a dictionary, which you can update with plugins that are easy to download, and best of all a flashcard program that you can program individual chapters from your book from school and test yourself without ever having to hand make a flashcard again. Of course this takes away from the practice of learning to write characters and stroke order, but this program does its purpose of helping people memorize characters and learn them by using this simple dictionary for reference. It takes up little memory on your computer and is very friendly. There is even a website that hosts a forum, where the creator listens to the users and makes changes and fixes the program very often.

That's about it. Also, the latest episode of Top Gear, Season 12 Episode 5, was sadly not that great. Oh well, I'm going home!