It seemed reasonable to give myself a week or so to adjust. Being thrown into this new situation with a handful of insane FSU students after a couple months of nothing but debauchery, a certain level of slacking was to be expected. However, that adjusting period needs to have run it's course. Leveling out entirely would include some things that just aren't going to happen, but I'm putting forth a full fledged effort to do that which may be reasonably expected. One big aspect of it all is settling into a schedule. Up at 7am, school until noon, lunch, cool shit around town, take care of day to day things / sit around doing jack shit, dinner, study / sit around doing jack shit, sleep.
Today my cool thing was checking out a Buddhist temple and then trying to find a Jewish temple. I had been led to believe that Tianjin had a vibrant Jewish community at one point and that there was a synagogue here which may or may not have been torn down. My hopes tempered, when something called Tianjin Jueweushe Memorials showed up on my google phone I was pretty psyched. After many hours of googling and wiki-ing it had just fallen into my lap. So after checking out the temple of great compassion I set out for the temple of lox and dumplings. It was interesting getting there. The Google phone is pretty amazing, but the GPS has limitations when it comes to traveling on foot. So it served as more of a map. After walking back and forth down a street for a little bit it seemed that I was in the right place. Nothing looked like a synagogue, but there was an alleyway and it was definitely toward the dot on google maps... so I walked down it. There were more than a few stares and "Ni hao" didn't get a response or even a friendly smile in return. This was definitely not it. But it was old and there was a plaque, so it wasn't a total loss. Hopefully my professor will have some idea of what the plaque means so I can get an idea of what it was I was looking at.
Today my cool thing was checking out a Buddhist temple and then trying to find a Jewish temple. I had been led to believe that Tianjin had a vibrant Jewish community at one point and that there was a synagogue here which may or may not have been torn down. My hopes tempered, when something called Tianjin Jueweushe Memorials showed up on my google phone I was pretty psyched. After many hours of googling and wiki-ing it had just fallen into my lap. So after checking out the temple of great compassion I set out for the temple of lox and dumplings. It was interesting getting there. The Google phone is pretty amazing, but the GPS has limitations when it comes to traveling on foot. So it served as more of a map. After walking back and forth down a street for a little bit it seemed that I was in the right place. Nothing looked like a synagogue, but there was an alleyway and it was definitely toward the dot on google maps... so I walked down it. There were more than a few stares and "Ni hao" didn't get a response or even a friendly smile in return. This was definitely not it. But it was old and there was a plaque, so it wasn't a total loss. Hopefully my professor will have some idea of what the plaque means so I can get an idea of what it was I was looking at.
[Update: according to Dr. Lan this is an area where a communist youth organization would gather prior to the formation of the PRC]
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