(Please excuse typos - typed on my iPhone due to internet problems with my laptop). Happy Halloween everyone! Does anyone have a creative costume this year? I don't think anyone can get more creative than my mom...she made me the BEST handmade costumes growing up. You might not have expected Halloween to be big in China, but it has actually become quite popular among the younger generation in the bigger cities. Lots of Halloween parties! I celebrated Halloween with my Chinese classmates from my Operations Management class (the ones I am doing the group project with). They took me to Happy Valley (a HUGE theme park in Shenzhen and one of the main attractions in the city). You could easily spend 5 whole days at this theme park and still not have time to try every ride. Happy Valley has a special Halloween theme this week, so we got to experience several "Ghost Houses" and Halloween performances. The haunted houses were a bit different than in the states, as the spooky characters were dressed in costumes from Ancient Chinese dynasties, a nice twist! I also got to attend my first 4D movie in Chinese! We spent from 4pm-10pm at Happy Valley and then went to Pizza Hut to top off the night. Pizza Hut is quite different than in the States. It is very fancy here...and not cheap! There was not a single thing on the menu I could have (everything has cheese...in America you can just tell the waiter "please give me pasta without cheese" or "I would like that salad with no meat"...but in China, it does not work like that. Restaurants will NOT change what is on the menu...even for dietary needs. So, I went across the street to Starbucks and got my soy milk Latte and a muffin and brought it to Pizza Hut. We shared a lot of laughs and stories and got on the last bus back to campus. It is so nice that my OM group has become such great friends. We have decided to do some sort of excursion together every Tursday - we speak half Chinese half English so we both get to practice our second language. It was a late night considering we all had to be up for military training the next morning!! FYI- I LOVE military training. It is like a free workout training session! We do all the same drills I paid to do in my personal training sessions in Shanghai last year (but I paid about 50 dollars per session...and military training is free.) Anyways, I am going to office hours now for OM - I need some extra help with calculations we learned. Next week is my last week of classes before we start our second module! Time is flying. Next week, I will update you all with my course selection for the next module as well as an update about what I have learned in the first 9 weeks of business school. Love you all! XO
