I have been in China for over a week now! I left for the flight to China on May 26th and arrived on May 27th. During the airplane ride, I wore a mask as a precautionary measure for preventing the spread of Swine Flu. I hated wearing the mask; it felt like putting your head under a blanket for an indefinite amount of time. But everyone else seemed so hardcore into wearing the mask so I kept mine on too. Also, my parents had pushed for me to wear the mask at all times.

The airline I took was Cathay Pacific. I’ve taken their planes in the past on my flights to Vancouver and I have to say again that I love their planes! Not the food on the plane–I took pictures and it makes me a little sick to look at what I ate. But the entertainment was good. I could choose what I wanted to watch during the airplane ride. I didn’t know airplanes had that feature now. I chose to watch a few episodes of Friends and then A Beautiful Mind. Ah…I cried at the end of the A Beautiful Mind (I had to take off my mask to wipe away the tears).

In China, I’ve lived the first seven days with my aunt’s family in their apartment in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. Their house is really clean and I like it. However, even though they live on the ninth floor, mosquitoes always manage to get into their house. Apparently, they didn’t come before and it was only after I came to their house that there have really been any mosquitoes. I always wake up to two new bites now.

The past week, I’ve mainly been doing shopping. Shopping was fun for the first two days but on the third day, in one store that had no air conditioning, I managed to get seven mosquito bites in a ten-minute time frame. My left leg looked like it broke out in major hives because of how swollen the bites got.

My cousin then gave me a formula to put on my skin so that mosquitoes won’t bite me any more. Guess what happened? My arms actually broke out in hives afterward. I still have the hives now and the bites are terribly itchy!

But now, I’m visiting my other relatives. I’m now in Meixian where I’ve just met my maternal grandparents. As I walked in and greeted them, they smiled and then patted my face. Unfortunately, they speak in my home dialect, Hakanese, which I can only sometimes understand. I can largely understand my grandmother’s mixture of Mandarin and Hakanese though.

I’ll be starting my advertising internship next Tuesday or so!

School hasn’t even ended yet, but I’m already yearning for the summer. It’s currently reading period and exams start next week. My exam schedule is lovely: Life Science and Physical Science on May 14th and Chinese on May 15th. So, all back-to-back. But, at least I am finished earlier. I do have to wait until my sister is finished with her exams before I go home, but that means just time to relax, take some needed pictures of Harvard campus that I am lacking, and go shopping! Hopefully there will be sales going on.

But on summer plans, I will be going back to China this summer for an advertising internship at a newspaper company. I’m so excited! I’m excited to brush up on my Chinese, see how China has changed, work in the country under a professional setting, and just enjoy myself in general. I am also looking to take up a dance class in learning how to dance hiphop so I won’t be self-conscious in taking up a hiphop dance next semester.

Now I should be getting back to studying. Or actually, writing a paper. Oh how I detest writing papers.

Just now, I looked over my iGoogle page and saw in the technology section of the news So Long, Geocities: We Forgot You Existed. After reading this humorous but a little offensive article, I checked up on Geocities and realized with a pang of sadness that it was indeed closing. Although I haven’t been on Geocities or a website hosted by Geocities for years, I still remember it as one of the first website hosting services that I ever used. I still remember the days when I tried to create fansites on Geocities dedicated to TV shows that I loved and in the process learned HTML and CSS. Or, how I also scoured the Internet (I don’t remember if I used Google or Yahoo! as my search engine–it was that long ago) for javascript code that would prevent the Geocities ads from showing. But then Geocities upgraded and all those ad-preventing scripts were broken.

Oh, it was a love-hate relationship with this hosting provider. But soon enough, I moved to Freewebs and eventually found hosting on a subdomain. Then I won a domain and hosting for a year and eventually bought my own domain and hosting. So now I’m here.

Geocities, you’ve had a good life. I thought you were always going to last, but I guess everything has a time when it has to go.

I went to an InFocus meeting about Hedge Funds today. I wanted to go since I’ve heard about hedge funds so much, but I keep on forgetting what it is. I’m still not exactly sure what it is, and the people who came from Sankaty weren’t absolutely sure either, but they gave us tips about how to determine whether something is a hedge fund or not. If it’s not private equity or mutual fund, it will most likely be a hedge fund. But I forgot what a private equity is. I need to go review some more.

But I did learn about how hedge funds earn so much money and about leverage. We think it’s so hard to earn $10 million, but if you’re in a good hedge fund and you’re smart, it doesn’t seem that hard. At least, when it was written on the board.

I do wonder what the hours are in working in a hedge fund. I guess it’ll be the same as any other financial company–16 hour work days probably.

It has been a while since I last started a new website. Getting back into the swing of things was an interesting experience–I didn’t realize how much I had missed designing websites and writing code until I created the subdomain and started uploading material. Refreshing my screen to see if my layout turned out all right gave me a nostalgic feeling. This was also fueled by listening to Take a Bow by Rihanna as I was finishing up the website. I had listened to that song so many times last summer, that hearing the first few notes gave me a sense of longing.

Anyway, I created a new website called Food Blogs at Yinten. I actually created this website with the sole reason that my sister wanted a blog to keep a food log. She has wanted to go on a diet for some time, but she also loses self-control and eats some junk food here and there, calories that make up any calories she had cut down in other parts of her diet. Thus, she wanted to keep a food log so she would be more conscious of what she was feeding into her body.

Through this website, you can create a blog. The blogs could be about anything related to food. Do you like to share recipes? Create a blog and so others can try out your dish! Or are you trying to lose weight? Keep a food log and see what unhealthy items you are eating–it will also help you realize how much self-control you have while eating.

I have already created a food log blog and I think it will help me eat healthier. I like writing little notes to myself after looking through what I ate that day so I can eat better in the future.

Visit the website at http://food.yinten.com!