My name is Jixuan Zhang. Call me Sandy. I’m majoring in Economics. I’m from Chengdu, China. It is a big city located at east part of China .It is a city famous for hot pot and pandas. Hot pot is a very special and local food in Chengdu. Basically you just put a big simmering metal pot at the dinner table and add a lot of chili and sichuan pepper into the pot. While the pot is simmering, you could add any ingredient you want. Having hot pot every once in a while means that you need to have a very high tolerance of spicy food. And I love spicy food. I don’t have any brothers or sisters thanks to the single-child policy in China. So growing up in a big city without a sibling can get quite lonely at times too.
Sadly, I don’t have a dog. It is not easy to have a dog in a big city like Chengdu. But I love dogs and I used to spend a lot of time with my cousin’s dog. It’s a white Labrador.
For this class, I do want to learn a lot about college writing. All my previous experience about college writing comes from FYS, which is obviously not enough at all.
As for my life after class, I spend a lot of time playing soccer and tennis with my friend. I also like to watch soccer games on weekend. Real Madrid and Manchester United are my favorite teams. Although the United is not doing so well recently, I have been supporting them for over 10 years.
I loved how you jumped straight into talking about the Hot pot – it sounds like something that would blow me and my bland, spiceless Irish lineage away. However, I do love to try new things and that sounds pretty tasty. As for your family, I can’t imagine not having the two brothers I have that have been so influential in my life, but I can completely sympathize with not being able to have a dog. Not only is half my family, including myself, allergic, but where my dad grew up in Dublin, dogs weren’t really considered pets, rather grimy street dwellers looking to steal your food. This doesn’t stop me from playing around with dogs when I get the chance though. Thanks to the brilliance of modern medicine, I can take a pill of Claritin and eliminate about 50% of the physical problems that dogs cause for me. There’s no better feeling than playing with an energetic little puppy like the one in the picture you posted!
Hi Sandy! Your introductory blog post definitely grabbed my attention and I loved the background information about Chengdu. I was curious though, when you mentioned pandas, if you would go into any further detail about their importance like you did with hot pots. Also, considering that you love dogs but unfortunately taking care of them is difficult in cities – do you think you would ever potentially own a dog in the future?
Hi Sandy, I’m an only child too except I must say I don’t feel lonely at all. Perhaps it is because I do consider my dog to be my ‘little brother” but even before I had a dog, I actually enjoyed being an only child. Not having any siblings growing up definitely shaped my personality too. I feel that I became more independent in some ways because of it. I also think it definitely made me more creative because when I was younger I would have to think of ways to entertain myself since I didn’t have anyone to play with at home so I often used my imagination to make up fantasy stories.
Welcome to ENG 202, Sandy. I hope this semester provides you with some new ways to explore your writing and allows you to build on what you learned about writing in your FYS.