Last week I've been pretty busy. During the day I had my classes and during my spare time I spent a lot of time in REAL. This week I haven't really tried any new or special food, maybe I am just getting used to the food now so certain things are becoming normal.

The Monday morning project is going alright, it is still very hard to understand the teacher and the teaching students, but by reading ourselves we're able to do something anyways. At least we have connected almost all the hardware and the program is running well in the simulator so maybe next week we can test it on our own physical system. In the evening we went out eating to this place on the photo, where the food is standing on a conveyor belt and going around. Everyone has a small hotpot with boiling water and can cook his or her own food. Then you pay for what you have eaten. I couldn't find anything special to eat there, only pig's blood is something that I hadn't tried before. It comes in jelly-like cubes and then you first boil it and then eat it. It tastes a bit strange but it is okay. Not too bad.

The Money and Banking course is still quite difficult for me. I have never had any class regarding financials and now I'm getting an intensive study class in economics. Most of it is somewhat familiar but there are definitely some things that I've never heard of before. It was actually pretty unexpected that I'm having this course. It's interesting, but difficult and tiresome. It is as a four-hour class of a difficult subject. Luckily afterwards I had the English corner, so I could basically talk about everything that comes to mind. We had a small arm-wrestling competition during class, which seemed to be a new sport for the Chinese students.

This week we had our first practical class for the CNC Machining Technology class. We went to the laboratory and had to machine some parts that the teacher had drawn on the whiteboard. At first we should have used the lathe but because it had some problems and he didn't know how to solve them, we used the milling machine. First we wrote the program on the whiteboard and then programmed the machine. It cut the parts the way it was supposed to do, so that was good.

In one of the places where we went for dinner was no waiter and we had to write down what we wanted to eat. Luckily there were pictures of the food with the Chinese name under it. So to order I copied the Chinese characters and hoped it was good enough so that they'd understand and we'd get the right dishes. At first we got three beers, so that was a good start. Also the food was exactly what we've ordered, so that was perfect. When paying for the dinner the owner didn't have a receipt but he told us the amount. Because we'd been studying the number in class, we could understand how much we had to pay. That felt pretty good actually, to actually be able to understand something.

In the weekend I'd been teaching a class. It was a two-hour lecture and that was pretty unexpected. I went to REAL to have my presentation checked and then they asked me if I could do someone else's presentation this week and do mine next week. So I wasn't really prepared and in my opinion it didn't go very well. But it was my first time and it was someone else's presentation. So I hope that next week will be better. Then I'll be talking about the Netherlands and not about shopping. But let's see how it will go then.