From Alyssa

Alyssa Parker

Blog Post #4

6/2/11

        Today the company I’m working for was moving offices- within the same building though, so it wasn’t horrible. I thought it was extremely interesting when the movers showed up, as they were all little Chinese women. And they were feisty! They moved the entire office in one day! I was very impressed with how much these ladies could do. I had Thai food for lunch, which is a lot better than the Thai food they have in America, if you can imagine that. Thai food in America is awesome, and this was even better! My internship so far has paid for all of my lunches. Hopefully this continues. The girl who is my supervisor at the internship, Ting Ting, is really nice. She is only a few years older than me, and it’s been fun talking with her and learning new Chinese phrases that you can’t learn in a textbook or class. I won’t write them here since this a PG blog.

        They told me today they also want me to teach their CFO English as one of my jobs while I am here. That should be interesting. Thankfully, he’s pretty young and fun to talk to. He asked me what Chinese foods I do not like. The list is relatively long, but I only told him choudofu (stinky tofu—oh.my.god. it’s awful), jipigu (chicken rear ends--obviously), sea urchin, and zhenzhu (the tapioca balls they sometimes put in milk tea).

        I went to starbucks for the first time yesterday- the cashier’s name tag said “Cherry.” It was a man cashier. They speak really good English in starbucks though. I feel like it is a requirement when they get hired to speak fluent English. This weekend is the Dragon Boat festival- hopefully the people here running our program know of something cool to do to celebrate.