For the past two days, we have been stressing about our service learning project. This project is about connecting with the community and helping the community by adding to the library of Service Learning Videos and documenting the stories of the community during the hard times of the cultural revolution. We went to the community and made connections with the people here. We made some fantastic friends (as you can see from my other journal posts) and after making strong connections with Mr.Li, we asked him to be our service-learning partner.

Today was a great day. There was one Alumni from the Microcampus Alumni-S that came to visit us. His name is Barton C. and he showed me a weird device. This device is very exotic. It was black, but when you turn it on, it showed different colors. This thing also has a high-quality camera and many high-tech games. You can also call with this thing. He claimed it was a phone, but I did not believe him. Phones are bricks, like my Motorola and other people's Nokia. His "phone" is very flat.

Now, being Day 23, the workload was really starting to pile up I found that work was takingloneger and longer to finis up work. In order to be able to fix this, I thought that maybe I should wake up at 6 AM. Which I did. I ended up walking in the dark to find my computer which I evetually saw on the dark table of Classroom 1. I brought it back to the TV room and got comfortable to start a work session of around 3 hours. 

One of my favorites snacks here in Xizhou are the pineberries, or white strawberries if you must. I especially enjoy munching on the larger ones because of their slight crunchiness and the more apparent hint of the taste of pineapple. 

I think I may prefer pineberries more than normal strawberries now; the color, the taste, and the texture is just so much more enjoyable and delicious.

Enough about fruit now.

Today is day 24 of Microcampus, throughout the 24 days, I have met extremely nice and interesting people.

This afternoon Taylor S. and wanted to print some pictures that we took with Jie Jie and Nai Nai who taught us tie-dye. We went to a printing shop in Sifang Jie and got the pictures printed and laminated. We first went to see Jie Jie and Nai Nai and give them each a photo, when we got there we sat down and gave them the photos, and they were really happy and spent a while looking at the photos. 

Brandt was our main source of comedy today during Service Learning. He was the one who was able to calm our nerves during the hard hours of Service Learning work. Perhaps the most interesting time was when he had a mango and was playing around with it (do not play with food kids!). First, he attempted to play catch with it resulting in the mango smashing to the floor, at least it did not burst... When we picked it back up, the mango felt airy (when you pressed down it seemed to shrink by 150%).

The Microcampus Voyagers pivotal priority today was to finish editing and translating our Service Learning movie. My Service Learning group -- Sunny, Josie, Anders, and I had two hours of film and we had to synopsize or condense the central points of Mr. Li's (our Service Learning partner) life as well as incorporating his values and principles all within a five-minute video.

A group of friends and I started wearing acorns. 

Sounds very random right? Well, it is, all around Xizhou, there are these little shops that might sell earrings or necklace. These shops would almost always have small artificial acorns that can be attached to a string and makes a necklace. It was very surprising how we would always run into them again and again, so I and a group of friends bought a bunch at a discounted price, and now we are wearing them. 

Now being Day 22, the work is really starting to pile up, so when given free time, Sonia Z and I went out to Sifangjie to do some shopping. We left the stress and pressure of our computer screens and head out for the bustling area outside the door.