Hello everyone!  Hopefully you’re all having a lovely, relaxing summer.  Mine’s been pretty busy.

Work is going well, though doing four ten-hour days per week is pretty rough.  Most people do an ordinary 40-hour work week with five eight-hour days, but I thought it would be more valuable to have that extra day to do stuff to prepare for the China/Japan trip.  The extra day is handy, but sometimes it’s hard to get through ten hours a day sitting in a cubicle and staring at a computer screen.

We’ve been able to do a lot of cool stuff for the interns (putting out a newsletter, organizing a picnic, etc.) so it’s been pretty cool overall.  My role as intern liaison (a sort of semi-formal leadership position) has been keeping me pretty busy with planning events and other projects.  My actual work involves testing some projects that I developed during the school year that run audits of database servers to make sure they’re in accordance with some legal requirements.  It’s not the most fascinating work, but the team is really supportive and I know that what I’m doing makes a difference to the business.

As far as preparing for the China/Japan trip, things are coming along quite nicely.  I made up a packing list already, though I’m nowhere close to being ready to pack stuff up.  I just kept going about my daily life and saying to myself, “Oh, don’t forget that you need to bring nail clippers on the trip,” and so on, so I just started writing it down.  All my paperwork and stuff is up to date so far, though I still need to pick up the textbooks for the trip. 

I’ve been kind of trying to learn Mandarin with the help of a friend who went on the trip last year.  It’s a really fun language to speak, but it’s hard to get the sounds right, let alone the tones.  Hopefully I can learn to speak it at least a tiny bit before we leave.  I’ve had more exposure to Japanese so I’m not as worried about that one, plus we go to China first so it’s more pressing that I learn Mandarin now.

We also get some time off for vacations in both places and so I’ve been trying to decide where to go.  I’m pretty sure that I want to go to Xi’an for the week vacation we have in China.  Xi’an is the city with the terra cotta soldiers, though there’s a lot more to see there as well.  For shorter trips I’ve also been looking at Tai’an (a city at the base of one of the holy mountains), Qingdao (the birthplace of Tsingtao beer and a former German territory), and Tianjin (which is a city close to Beijing that travel guides recommend because it’s often ignored by tourists, so you can see “real” Chinese culture).  As for Japan, I’m not quite so sure.  I’d like to go to Tokyo, but travel is much more expensive there than in China and it’s quite a trip to go there from Kyoto.  I will probably take a trip to Hiroshima, but aside from that I don’t know yet.

If there are any major developments in the trip planning or anything, I’ll be sure to post about it.  In the meantime, enjoy the summer sun for me… I’m stuck looking out at it through the window at work!