Monday, June 8, 2015

Day 28 - Part II: First day on the job

It’s the third day since classes ended and homestay began. The weekend was pretty busy, my host family has been bringing me around Nanjing. On Saturday we went to Lao Men Dong and Confucius Temple, where we ended the night with a boat ride on the river. Sunday, we went to the Sun Yat-sen memorial on the Zhong Shan Ling, the Purple Mountain. 

Today however, was the first day of internships. My internship starts fairly late, I was to be there by 10:00 am, a welcome change from the 8:00 am morning classes. My host family all left for school and work before me, so I headed over to the bus stop myself. Thankfully, my host sister Wu Yue, or Pallas, had gone with me the day before to show me where the bus station was and I was able to make it there without much trouble. It was my first time taking public transportation on my own in China so I basically double-checked everything so I wouldn’t get lost. 
My internship for the week is at Skyways, a bakery. It’s essentially right next to Nanjing University, so most of us have actually been there before and the owner, Patrick Heckelmann, was one of our speakers a couple weeks ago. Once at Skyways, we met with Patrick to discuss what we would be doing for the week. While chatting over hot chocolate and croissants, it was decided that Malia and I would create a survey to be given to Skyways customers, finding out some general demographics of the customers as well as what they like to do at Skyways. The survey will be created today and tomorrow, Wednesday we will visit the office at a different location, and Thursday and Friday will be spent getting customers to take the survey. 

After this was decided, we spent an extra hour talking to Patrick about all manner of things before getting to work on the survey itself. All the questions on the survey need to be in both English and Chinese. As neither of us had a computer on us, the survey was drafted on Malia’s phone, and I later formatted it in Word. We also met up with Dong lao shi who suggested that we head to other bakeries and see how they compared to Skyways. 

In the evening, I headed back on the bus again. I got home before anyone else, so I made use of the key they gave me and went and took a short nap. My host mom returned at about 6:30 so we had dinner together and discussed some of the differences between American and Chinese colleges. My host sister got back around 9:30 pm from school. She’s really busy right now preparing for exams. She’s not taking the Chinese university exam, but rather is in an IB program and hopes to go school in London, which is really cool. 

Overall, it was a fun day. Even though it’s only Monday, I feel like this week will be over all too soon, so I need to make the most of my time here. 

- Patricia G.



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