After I came back from Hakuba, I spent most of my time in bed for two days. Then I was dragged to an internship, shadowing a day trader and hopefully became some sort of a day trade newbie in less than one month. I am using the word “dragged” because honestly I didn’t want to do this internship at first. I later realized that for my own good and future possibility of finding a job (which seems feeble from my current position) I needed, or had to do this. My daily routine at the job involves:

6:20am daily questioning my decision of accepting this freaking internship 😉 crying goodbye to warm bed how can a southern china city be so cold all of a sudden???

1.5 hrs metro ride with sleepy eyes and questioning the meaning of life

8:30am -4:30pm work ( observing my colleagues’ awesome trading techniques, trying to implement them in my mock trading session and failed by losing tons of fake money for the nth time)

4:30pm – 6:00pm talk about my mock session today with one of my colleagues and submit a written file of things I learnt today

1.5 hrs metro ride home

Basically it’s the same ritual happening day after day. Although for one weekend, I got to spend some relaxing and lovely family time at a hot spring place near Huizhou.

(The bridge leading to the gate of the hotel we are staying at)

(Gate in the middle of the night. )

(Room decoration and a lovely elephant lol he/she has a bang)

(I was using a phone camera so the resolution is not great)

This is also the same weekend my cousin left for college, one week ahead of me. so we took this picture

(My two younger brothers are growing big and tall. The day they got taller than I was they stopped following orders. But I feel incredibly grateful for the love and support they gave me.)

I didn’t take pictures about the foods we had in Huizhou. The vegetables were delicious. One of the vegetables were called 观音菜, I was told that it only grew out of rocks, which is kind of an interesting and inspirational fact.

Then we went back to Shenzhen. My home city has grown so much in the four months I was gone. People ride public bikes around town these days.

(See the bar code below the seat? Just scan it and one can ride public bikes like this for 0.5 yuan per hour. I was told that these bikes were actually pretty high quality. One time I tried to bike all the way from work to home. It didn’t break halfway. I did. )

(#7 and #9 were new to me. On a side note, Bart is disgusting! I thought I got used to the weird smell and stuff… on the ground after two years. I missed the clean (sometimes packed) subway back home.)

(I saw this lavender ice cream!!! It tastes like lavender!!! Also, apparently people no longer pay with actual money now. )

The next weekend I finished my intern. I had three days left at home and we spent one day in Guangzhou. My brother bought this book

(??? what why??? )

I spent my last day with my friends from middle school. We’ve been friends for like… 9 or 10 years. Wow how time flies. I love the fact that when we sat together, I felt like that young girl wearing middle school uniform with non-nearsighted eyes. How I missed my eyes back in middle school. I had no problem recognizing people waving at me from far away. Now I have to apologize each time I kept a bare face and just walk past people now.

(In this cafe we talked about our life and plans. They made fun of me for not watching the new Harry Potter film. I miss them incredibly.)

(I feel like I should get some kind of a membership card at this restaurant now. It’s the same thing I ordered before flight every single time.)

And that(plus the two Hakuba log here and here) is my winter break bridging 2016 and 2017. Now I am back in Berkeley and I’m thinking about writing a blog post talking about my plans for this upcoming semester. I will do so once my classes are finally decided. In the meantime, Chinese New Year is right around the corner. I miss home incredibly. But I guess I have my own life and so do my friends and family back home. I hope I can make this semester a fulfilling one.