Anastasia Maslak- My Summer in Tianjin pt 1

Ni Hao,

    My name is Anastasia Maslak. I just finished my second year at Western University in the Green Process Engineering program. This summer I am participating in a research exchange organized by Professor Zhu, here in Tianjin, China. As part of this opportunity, I will be working as a research assistant in a lab that specializes in Crystallization technology at Tianjin University.

    It is hard to believe that I have nearly spent three weeks in Tianjin already. After a period of adjustment, I think I have finally brushed off the jetlag and have settled into a routine for the next couple months. I feel extremely honored to have such wonderful graduate students to supervise me in the lab and help me with anything else outside of it. They have brought me to delicious restaurants, helped me to set up the popular apps here in China and taught me some basic mandarin. I would have to say that the biggest challenge for me so far has been the language barrier. Luckily with the help of technology, such as google translate I can normally make out just fine. However, there have been some instances where things have certainly been “lost in translation”. On one of the first few nights here one of our awesome grad students brought my fellow classmate Ammi and I on a tour of the campus. We took a little break at one of the small lakes to take a look. A better word to describe this lake would have probably been a large pond as it could not have been larger than perhaps 1km in circumference. As we were admiring the lake I was trying to ask how close we were to the ocean (as Tianjin is a bustling port city). Our grad student started laughing for a solid 2 minutes and I could not understand why. Ammi later informed me that he thought I was asking if the pond was the ocean. We couldn’t stop giggling about the event later as we imagined it from his perspective.

    While week days are spent in the lab, weekends are spent travelling! Ammi and I are fortunate enough to be joined by a group of 11 colleagues from the University of Ottawa who are partaking in a similar program as we are. Our first weekend together we spent exploring Tianjin. With the use of the popular bike sharing app ofo, we were able to see many of the popular tourist extractions that the city has to offer.

    Just this past weekend we went to Beijing! On the first day we climbed the great wall. Although it was very physically demanding I would have to say it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.  Sunday we were able to spend some time exploring Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace.

Ammi (Right) and myself at a museum in Tianjin

Climbing the Great Wall! (That's me second from the right) 

As for now I am back in the lab! Until next time,

-Anastasia

Comments

[Marg]

Anastasia, great to hear that you are taking advantage of this opportunity right after finishing second year!
Sounds like you have experienced many things in your first three weeks already.
Look forward to reading more blogs!