yesterday's words: zài (again), jiàn (to see), xiànzài (now), kè (quarter hour)
Today's word (so far): máng (busy)

Language exchange went as well as could be expected. She seemed much younger than I expected and was very nice. However, I'm worried that it's going to be too one-sided. Instead of working on basic conversation, I ended up working on just the pronunciation of simple initial-final pairs. I felt pretty pathetic just repeating "shì, shì, shì" over and over again, interspersed with her trying to correct me. She says that all she wants is an opportunity to practice speaking english since it sounds like she pretty much speaks only Chinese at home and with her friends (Shanghainese, coincidentally enough), but the context and subject of the conversations may not be so helpful since she's planning on taking the medical certification exams, and her goal is to improve her speaking in that context (I think there's a practical section of the testing which simulates a patient evaluation). I hope she's not agreeing to continue simply because she's too nice to say no.

Oh, by the way, temperature in Andover when I left the office last night: -2°F

And a cool thing I found yesterday: an on-line Chinese-English dictionary that accepts and generates pinyin as well as traditional and simplified characters. Here are links to my name in Chinese: Yen(yan2) Kuo(guo2)-shing(xing4). I'm told that I was named by my grandfather. He wasn't too fond of the communists and apparently it's some kind of anti-communist slogan. I suspect it would be like being named "Freedom" or something. ("Hi, my name is 'Long-Live-the-Queen'...") I'll have to ask.