Taking Chinese Courses

During my university life, I took the beginning Chinese class series to fulfill the language requirement. It was actually a pretty fun class. It was much different than Chinese School, which I will cover in an upcoming post.

It was also more difficult than classes at Chinese school. For Chinese 1, although I managed to do well most of the quarter, I failed the final. It was the same routine for the finals for Chinese 2+3, which was rather difficult no matter how much I studied. It meant that my grade would be lowered by a 1/3 of a letter grade.

I also had a good study buddy! We helped each other out by sharing the book, providing notes, and tips about grammar and tones.

However, there were some pretty fun moments in my Chinese classes. I liked speaking Mandarin with other classmates. It was funny at times. It was also fun working on some of the skits. I'm going to share some of the videos that I did with some of my good Chinese class buddies.

I'm usually not one to act or be in front of the camera, but this was a skit that was for my Chinese course. If you do happen to watch the videos, then enjoy. Oh, and we spoke Mandarin that's in the basic level. But who knows, you might find yourself understanding it or what the characters are trying to do.

For the Love of Fishes

At the moment, I don't have any pictures of cooked fish. So, I guess I will either update it later or have another post about actual cooked fish. Better yet, I think I will do just that. Oh, and this is the 62th post of this year, that means I am now tied with the amount of posts from last year, which means I'm about to post a lot more this year than last year!

So, fish is big in my family. My baby sister and my parents go fishing. My other sister is scared of fish. And, well, my family consumes fish a bit too often. Actually, I think my mom makes fish way too often nowadays and I'm actually pretty tired of it. I miss her old cooking. She doesn't make steam fish or fried fish anymore. And, its more likely to be the fish that she got from fishing.

Here's a picture of the fishes that my family caught last Saturday. I really didn't expect them to catch that many. I always thought that people who went fishing would have to wait hours for fishes, but they brought home bucket of fishes. I wonder where they went fishing. When they were cooked, however, they weren't good.

One day when I came back home, I noticed that we had fishes! I was surprised that my mom would get them. But, she said that she wanted something to look at. If it were me, I would get birds. Anyways, I guess they are fun to look at and it's nice to have something else living at your home. It's not our first time having fishes, but it's pretty nice to have them around.

Celebrate Davis 2012

Today was the Celebrate Davis 2012 event. It is held in Community Park in Davis, CA. It's a pretty huge park. It was my first time at Community Park. I actually heard about this event through twitter. Then, from other websites. I don't think I would have went if I didn't find out about it yesterday.

I arrived at the event a couple of hours after it started. When I arrived, there were already a lot of people. There were people of all ages and families were there as well.

I have to say that I was surprised that there were so fun stuff to do. There was this clown making balloons.

There were also local businesses and others who had a spot in the park.

 Look at the stuff I got tonight. I have to admit that my favorite item was the Mondavi Center pin. Many of them gave out free stuff. Some allowed you to play games, spin wheel, or filled out forms to win prizes. One of the big prizes of the night was the Ipad.

Oh, and not let's forget about the getting to ring the dong! The person said it was from Indonesia, which sounded cool!

I got a balloon and some other great prizes!

There were even youth bands playing while I was there. I also read that the Band-Uh was performing earlier.

A balloon from the Retirement Community.

The crowd during Celebrate Davis.

View of another section of the park during the event.

I always wanted to go in one of those balloon things! They were having rat races, so they were pretty fun!

I been rock climbing before, so I didn't mind not doing it. And, there's always opportunities to go to Rocknasium or other rock climbing places.

 After walking around and getting prizes, we bought pizza from Steve's Pizza Place.
 

And, the finale was fireworks. It began at 9pm. I decided to record it once I found out it started. It's a bit shaky and it moves up and down since the fireworks dont go to the same places. I must also admit it was hard focusing on watching the fireworks when I was recording. I tried to do both. I liked the fireworks show. Short, but still good. Fireworks don't happen too often, so I'm glad that I got to enjoy it tonight.