school, and other things

Being a Northeastern student, I never thought that I went to a particularly hard school. It wasn't Harvard, or Yale; but I was paying over 40,000 a year to go here, so its standards better be pretty high. So you would think that studying abroad through Northeastern, they would send you to a school whose standards matched their own.

Not so much, here at ACT. My classes are either one hour, 3 times a week, or an hour and a half, 2 times a week. basically I'm not in class more than 3 hours per day. Greek 101 is good because it's challenging. I enjoy my Anthropology class because I'm learning about the culture of the country I'm living in. But my history classes... it's so difficult because I feel like I'm not learning anything. We have lessons, and such, but I feel like the teacher isn't asking us to reach our full potential. However, I feel like the Greek students here probably feel like they're being asked for more than their full potential. Which is frustrating. Some of them are pretty disrespectful to their professors. I would never think to speak that way to anyone at school, to simply ask if "they're done" with their lesson, 20 minutes before the class was even supposed to be over. The students bring up irrelevant information, and the professor simply goes along with it, and follows their tangents. It's not that I don't think our professors are qualified. Most of them have gone to school abroad, in the US and Europe. I just feel like they don't expect the students to do certain things, and also give the students too much freedom and flexibility so that they can slack off and bullshit their way through school.

A friend recently told me about how she heard a Greek student tell another student how "happy" they were that there were "orientals" studying abroad this semester. I am not even going to get into the implications of using the world "oriental" for describing a person. I have actually heard my history professor use this word, but I had to let it slide because its not like there has ever been anyone around to tell her that its wrong. But I noticed before, that if I'm in a small village or something, people look at me as if they've never seen an Asian person before. Sometimes I feel like I'm looking too much into it; but honestly, this is a feeling that I can never shake, something that follows me even when I'm in the US. The idea that someone looks at you and is either judging you based on your ethnicity, or admiring your so-called "exoticness." Its hard to explain sometimes, to people who have never been a part of a minority group (or even someone who's never felt completely different from everyone around them), but there will always be assumptions and expectations that other people have of me that will live in my mind and make me wonder if I am being labeled or judged every time I am looked at.

Being a minority abroad is a different experience. There have been multiple times when people look at me and tell me (or assume) that I am, in fact, NOT American, but Chinese. I tell them: no, I am very much American. As a matter of fact, I am Chinese-American. But all they see is my skin and one time, they have actually argued with me as if they knew better than me. It is frustrating because they cannot look past this one part of me, to realize that I am more multi-faceted than they could imagine. Instead, they put me in a little box, and leave it at that.

Another "funny" little situation: I was sitting at a cafe by myself the other day, by the window, on my laptop. Out of the corner of my eye, I see someone standing by the window. I glance over and realize a guy is standing there, looking at me. I turn back to my work and assume that we had just happened to lock eyes at that moment. Then he walks further down, closer to my line of vision, and just stands there, obviously staring at me. It was pretty uncomfortable, haha. I felt like I was at an exhibit or something. I'm glad the guy did not walk into the cafe. But a part of me wanted to turn to him, look him right back in the eye, and be like wtf do you want. Oh, people.