I'm on the Chinese internet

Thursday night I was sitting in the Sharing Bar (the internet bar and cafe on the first floor of my dorm) talking to my friend 曹睿 whom I met because she is a student teacher for my class. I was showing her things on the internet. When she asked me what sports I like and had never heard of hockey, I showed her pictures, etc. Then I googled my dad and showed her that he was in the NHL. She thought that was pretty cool. Because I couldn't get on facebook on the computers in the bar, I showed her my family through whatever pictures came up on google. At one point, google stopped working (as it is wont to do in China). Instead we used baidu, the Chinese equivalent. I searched myself and to my surprise, there was an article in Chinese about the competition I went to last year that included a brief overview of my performance.

http://www.sinovision.net/index.php?module=newspaper&act=details&col_id=51&news_id=133050

Here's the description of me from the above page (I pulled the simplified character version from a different website with the same article, but that didn't have the picture):

这位安静的、酷酷的女孩怀抱吉它坐在舞台上，唱起《对面的女孩看过来》，偶尔抬头腼腆地微笑。她演讲的题目是《我的中国之旅》，介绍了自己在北京留学的经 历。她说：“去年夏天我去了中国，在北京住了两个星期，在那里我看到有些贫穷的老人捡汽水瓶拿去卖钱，于是，我们就把瓶子留在宿舍里。有一次，一个老人到 学校操场捡汽水瓶，我们把200个瓶子给她，她哭了，然后又笑了，我从来没见过这样开心的笑容。”

I'll now provide a (bad) translation for those of you who can't read Chinese (there is some vocabulary I had to look up in there too).

This calm and cool girl hugged her guitar and sat on the stage singing " 对面的女孩看过来" (-Girl over there look over here), occasionally raising her head and bashfully smiling. The topic of her speech was "My travels in China," in which she introduced her study abroad experience in Beijing. She said: "Last summer I went to China, and was in Beijing for two weeks. There, I saw some poor elderly people collecting water bottles [I just noticed that this is a paraphrase of my actual speech] to sell, thus we kept our water bottles in our dormitory [I don't like this paraphrase, it makes my speech sound really lame]. One time, one elderly women came to the school's sports field to collect water bottles. We gave her 200 bottles. She cried and then smiled. I've never seen such a happy smile."

For any of you who can read Chinese, note that I translated 汽水瓶-soda bottles as water bottles only because in my actual speak I said water bottles.


I'm glad they didn't comment on my utter lack of singing ability and the fact that I was shaking head to toe whilst trying desperately not to look at the audience.

In other news, I'm subjecting myself to the torture of performance again at the same competition in a few weeks, but this time in China. There will be around twenty of us from Qingdao University going to Jinan, the provincial capital.