elevators.

it is comforting to me that the elevators here are made by mitsubishi or toshiba. the open door and close door buttons actually work.

i woke up to a text from olivia this morning :) i can't wait to hear about her trip to israel! today was the first real work day and it went pretty well. i put some pictures up on my desk and showed them to my group. we (my group) read some more of the articles and discussed our project more. we gotta get crackin on this work statement that is due this weekend. we'll probably try to finish it tomorrow so our academic mentor can review it before we give it to our industry sponsor, mr. guo.

i lunched in the cafeteria today with my group: cucumber slices and some chicken and veggie dish. also, a banana. they aren't big on drinks with meals here. we talked about chinese food in the US and i told them about antai and how my family eats there all the time. at 3pm every work day they have fruit in the lounge. today was watermelon :)

we had some questions for mr. guo so we had a meeting at 4pm. he kept telling us the problems are really really hard and he just wants us to understand the difficulties of the problem. understanding the problem requires a whole lot of computer science knowledge (routers, switches, servers, virtual machines, virtual data centers, newtwork topologies, etc). and there is no teacher. if you want/need to know about something, you look it up yourself and discuss it with your team members. my team consists of a CS major, EE major, and two math majors. today was a lot of the CS and EE majors explaining things to the math people. i really hope i am able to contribute something soon.

after work jasmine, brittany, and i went to try to find a massage place. it was hilarous because we knew it was in this building but the building had ten floors so we were going to each floor and looking for it. we got to like the 8th floor and found a foxit reader office. we were talking about the software and a guy from that office got on the elevator and he spoke english so he told us the massage place was on the first floor. we found it! but we didn't want a 90 minute one so we left. as we were walking out, we ran into some of the guys and went to dinner at a fast food noodles place. the drink i got tasted like barbecue potato chips.  mom, you would be appalled by the way you are supposed to eat here. but i'm leaning fast with these chop sticks.