你好！Today started early again with our classes beginning at 9am sharp. Although 9am seems like a pretty reasonable time, I still struggle to get out of bed every morning. We spent today's class reviewing material in anticipation of our second oral proficiency test which was this afternoon. OPI's happen every week in order to keep us on track with our learning and to gauge how much we are improving over the course of the program. Since we learned a lot more material this week, everyone was super stressed about today's test. It can be intimidating given that the teacher merely gives us a range topics to be familiar with and we don't actually know what questions the proctor will ask us. We definitely stressed ourselves out too much because in the end, everyone in our class improved from their last OPI.
I'm started to get used to our schedule and the campus more and although I still miss home very much, I am starting to have a little more fun here. Today is a special religious occasion for Ismaili Muslims across the globe and being away from family and friends, and not being able to attend our religious ceremonies made today a little hard for me. Luckily, I have made amazing friends here who helped me find a small way to celebrate anyways; this evening we dressed up and took photos around the campus. Although it wasn't the same as back home, it felt nice to be able to celebrate in someway.
We now have exactly a week until we move in with our host families. It's a bit of a bittersweet time because we are all excited to meet our host families and improve our Chinese during our stay with them, however, we only have a few more days left at the dorms, meaning we would be seeing a lot less of each other. Can't believe we are almost halfway through the program and that we only have about 2 and a half weeks of language classes left!
再见！