China, SAT, and Spanish.

I haven't blogged for awhile and the screen is making me blind so I'm not gonna be typing for long.

So today, what utterly amazed me was the one and only thing--chinese people.

I found this SAT and GRE prep website where ppl are sharing real exams, real essay prompts, and PDFs of prep books probably bought by other people. I mean, the first two are obviously illegal, what I don't really care. What can you do, we are chinese. we share, and we do illegal stuffs--animes, tv shows, songs, movies, w/e. Whatever is there to share we share.

There's something more though. I never knew that there are SAT test centers in hong kong, macao, taiwan, but not ONE in mainland china. The people who want to take SATs and stuff HAVE to travel to hong kong, maocao, or singapore (mainland chinese and taiwanese didn't really do direct traveling until recently, ppl have to go through hong kong). and apparently there's a scarcity of seats available in hong kong. and i read in a thread that it's recommended to take a month or two off from school before the test. WOW. that's a lot of sacrifice and one has to be pretty damned determined to take SAT and come to america. I would assume that for these chinese high school students taking SAT is a once-a-time thing. I don't think they get too many chances since not that many ppl can afford multiple trips to hong kong macao or singapore, plus the test fees (i read it's 4000 yuans, about 500 dollars, not sure how true but wow), plus the money you need to actually attend college there. It's just crazy.

Reading these stuffs make me appreciate my being here even more. Thanks mom, I luv youu.


OK, now moving onto spanish.

So as I was saying before, I'm trying to get in 10 min of spanish listeninig everyday. I've been watching spanish game shows, soaps, news and stuff. So this morning spanish version of sesame street was on TV and DAMN, it's pretty gooooood. And what happened was that, from plaza sesamo, I realized that spanish sound REALLY GOOD when it's sung. I really like those songs about "lavar tus dientes" or "es importante desayunar" that they sing on plaza sesamo, so i went on to google and youtube to find some good latin music. and i found this guy called louis fonsi--nice voice and good-looking. <3