Nanjing, Day 29

Today was a pretty chill day.  Woke up early, went to class early.  Our Chinese teachers are really great and we learned quite a lot today.  We actually ended up skipping about 4 or 5 lessons recently but we’re still powering through the chapters.  A chapter every two days and a final on Friday.  Things are looking grim for some but I think that as long as everyone studies hard and does their work everything will be fine.  Our teacher Zhang Laoshi usually goes through all the new vocabulary with us and then we go over the conversations in the book with the new vocab she went over as we put it into practice and learn how to use it. Jiang Laoshi’s teaching style is a bit more preferable to me because instead of just reading and reciting we do drills with the new vocabulary and grammar and it really sticks to you. She also talks a bit faster and uses a wider range of vocabulary so our listening comprehension really improves a lot because of that.

Everyone went back to their internships today, we didn’t go yesterday since it was the dragon boat festival and all.  Tommy and I work together at 兴业银行 (Xing Ye Yin Hang) which is a Chinese bank.  When put into my handy little translator it means Societe Generale – I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone but it sure doesn’t to me, so it probably isn’t the actual meaning.  Today was a very busy day for them so when I got there I had to just sit around and translate some of their contracts into English for about forty five minutes or so.  Then Tommy showed up (he had opened a bank account with a different Chinese bank for funsies) and our boss came over shortly after and started chilling with us.  They didn’t have much for us today our boss Kevin (his English name, I already forgot how to say his Chinese one) gave us some brochures of a new product they’re offering and told us to translate it and then after he’d test us.

The product was a Fund that had a minimum investment of 100,000 yuan which is around 15,000 dollars and lasted for 10 years.  After we finished translating and passed his test (we only passed because we’re lucky enough to both have electronic dictionaries) he just sat and talked to us for a while.  We spent a lot of time discussing investing in China.  Apparently many Chinese companies will take a lot of their income and invest in products such as the one he showed us earlier just so that they won’t have to pay any taxes on that income.  In America there’s a tax on dividends so American companies may not want to invest their income like this, but in China there’s absolutely no taxes on stock dividends or capital gains.  Anyone else who invests knows how truly awesome this is. China’s stock market is growing pretty fast right now and it’s a really attractive market for investors, I myself would love to invest in it, but unfortunately cannot since I’m not a Chinese citizen and therefore have no ID number which is required.  Anyone out there reading this and does should definitely try their hand at trading, as long as they can keep up with it of course.  If you do heed my advice you may also want to know that in the Chinese Stock Market, Red indicates an increase, and green indicates a decrease.  Completely opposite from the United States.

After internships we all went to language partners.  My language partner is really funny and nice, and I know that some people don’t really like theirs or going to language partner time, but I love it.  It’s a great chance to practice my Chinese, learn more Chinese that I actually want to use, and just unwind a bit.  I have about 10-15 pages of paper completely filled with stuff my language partner taught me, so for me it’s a very rewarding experience.  And afterwards I always feel like practicing my Chinese even more.  I went out to eat after and spoke Chinese with anyone I could.  Anyways that was about all I really did today – the only thing I have left to say is never try to do laundry after the Dragon Boat Festival.  I’d smell baaaad tomorrow if it weren’t for the fact I was lucky enough to remember to bring febreeze with me.

- Aaron H.