Taking the proficiency test and other mis-adventures

I made sure today that I walked around and took more pictures of the area to get to know the city better since I'm staying here for the next 3 months.
The past two nights I haven't been getting more than 3-4 hours of sleep, I think its due more to my bed than the remaining jetlag that I have. Its just hard to sleep when you're laying on your side and the surface you're laying on makes you think that maybe the floor would be a better idea.

Placement tests were today, I don't know where I got the info from, before I left home, but I thought that the placement tests were the HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi). It was moderately easy, but I think that I would have done a lot better if I had just come out fresh from last semester's Chinese. It was 3 parts, first I was in a room with about 20 people and they gave us a worksheet with several columns on it. There were a total of 120 words which consisted of 2-3 characters, and the objective was to write in the pinyin with the correct tones....eya I haven't really paid attention to tones since the beginning of 2nd yr Chinese.

I went through it twice and ended up filling out about 80% of the words, it was hard for me because I'm used to reading/writing in traditional characters, and I rose my hand to ask if they had a traditional character sheet, they sort of laughed at me and said no. I mean I it was a stupid question seeing I was in China and not Taiwan but I had to ask anyways. Overall this part was ok, I know my letters were right but I'm pretty sure my tones were all way off. I did look around the room before I turned in the worksheet and a large majority of the people had pretty blank pages with maybe 20-30 characters down. I would have done a lot better and would have been more confident if it was in trad. char. but I gotta get used to not having nice teachers like Liu Laoshi around here

People are really trying to push for learning Simplified characters because they say that its a lot easier than traditional. In my opinion, traditional is a lot easier because if you've studied enough, you see patterns and can kind of guess relationships between similar meaning words, where simplified is kind of just taking shortcuts. Everybody is open to their own opinion, but here it doesn't really seem like I have a choice to do it my way haha

The 2nd part of the proficiency test was to read some lines in pinyin and then random characters. This was pretty easy, I didn't find any trouble with it.

The part that made me feel really dumb was the oral part, the teacher asked me really simple questions like introduce myself or what am I doing in china, and I answered her with simple grammar patterns and tripped up on really low level vocab...

The good part was that she said I was definitely not going to be in Level A, but probably in Level B. I was counting on being placed on C or D, but she said that I should wait for the results tomorrow morning and discuss it with them.

The proficiency test was scheduled at 8:30 and I was out of there at 9, so it went fairly quickly. I kind of just wandered around a bit around campus and tried to pay my room fees but my check card didn't work this time.

Lunch was pretty good today. I got a huge bowl of noodles with some tomato and pork sauce smothered all over it, and I finally found my favorite thing to drink while i was in Hong kong, Nestea Ice rush, this lemon flavored ice tea that makes your mouth feel cold. Both the noodles and the bottle of nestea cost 6 rmb so less than a buck, and I couldn't even finish the noodles, I felt bad but they burned my tongue so they got what they deserved...

At 1:30 I decided to go wander around the area looking for good shopping places or something that would keep me busy for the afternoon. I took some pics and found a store that sold glasses, so I walked in to check out their sunglasses selection.

Geeze, ok I don't know if I should consider this harassment or just good customer service, but right when I walked in, I was greeted by a woman and led to the sunglasses area, another woman popped up behind me and handed me a pair saying I looked good in them,and then the first lady already had a mirror ready. I wanted a pair with darker lenses but I don't think they understood me and started shoving sunglasses with black frames my way. And then another woman that worked there walked up and said I looked very good in the pair they handed to me.
I'm definitely a fan of good service, but this was ridiculous and I politely thanked them and told them that I'll think about it, the price for one that looked ok was 199rmb, so not bad. But still they kind of scared me away...

I walked another mile down the street and found a smaller looking store and again I ran into the same ordeal, but these sunglasses were polarized and looked similar to a pair that I had at home that broke, I am really really bad with sunglasses because I tend to lose, drop, or scratch any that I own so the cheaper the better. The price tag said 169rmb, so I went with them. The lady used a machine that I've seen jewelers use to clean rings with, so I was getting them all clean and shiny. I handed her 200rmb but she said that it was only 96. So yah I paid about $14 for a pair of sunglasses that I'm going to lose or break in about 2 weeks so that's a deal for me.

Shoot it looks like I missed dinner again, but I have to go to the corner grocery anyways to buy more wang lee hom water, and another phone card.