nick’s (n)-line life

Today I attended the first lesson of a beginner’s Chinese course. For those who regularly read my blog you might have realised the slight problem with this: I’m not exactly a beginner!

After the lesson I had a chat with the teacher and she suggested that there wasn’t much point in me attending this particular course, at least not for next 15 lessons or so, after which I might start to get some benefits from the time. Now, it’s pretty great to know hat I’ve made some progress, and really funky to remember the first time I tried to learn the contents of this lesson (ni hao!), but it does leave me with something of a dilemma: who the hell do I get to teach me now? So my Chinese is too good for a beginners course and [probably] not quite good enough for an intermediate course. Looks like I’ll have to keep practising on my own for a while or shell out for a private tutor… 8@!!*©/$ Doh!

Oh yes, I found a couple of really funky books in the Uni Libary yesterday (gosh, I’m a third year and this was my first venture into the big bad UL!). I picked up an excellent book charting the historical development of characters: Understanding Chinese Characters (Edoardo Fazzioli); a funky pop-culture type book on Chinese language: Speaking of Chinese (Raymond Chang); and the slightly famous Basic Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook, hum, with all of this reading to do before the books are due back next week I wonder how I’ll get my law work done :: scratches head :: and I didn’t even get the book I came in for! I’m so dissillusioned, I thought they had all the books with an ISBN number! :(

On the more +ve side, I’ve just started to get involved with dHIVerse. From the name I hope it won’t surprise anyone to learn that it’s an HIV charity operating on a wide range of projects in Cambridge. I’m going to be doing some volunteering for them over the next year or so and I’m quite excited! To this end, I’ve got three training sessions coming up and I should be able to do something useful within two weeks or so. One of the projects in particular caught my eye: working with the Cambridge’s affected Black population, something I feel is really worthwhile.

Oh yes, I’m also all booked up for Yoga and Lion dancing! Yay, I love this time of year when I can still be optomistic about my time commitments! :)

Lastly, I also had some whinging today for not finishing my travel blog, “I want to know what happens nextâ€? I think the comment was! :) Ok, ok, I take the, um… hint… I’ll get it sorted!