Excitement!

I leave for a summer of studying in Shanghai on Monday, but I have been looking forward to this for months now. I am arriving a day earlier than most of my classmates, so that means I get to have an adventure of trying to get from the airport to somewhere near the school and then finding a cheap hotel until the next day when we are allowed to move in. After looking it up, there are three ways of getting from the airport to the school: Taxi, Bus, or Subway. The program I am with is telling us to take the taxi, but I seek danger and its expensive (and by expensive I mean like $25, but we’re ignoring that.) So bus or subway it is, both of which require walking about 10 minutes to the school afterwards and cost like $3.

So last year I went all over China and completely fell in love with the country. I went to Guilin, Lijiang, Chongqing, and Chengdu. I met some friends in Chengdu who I plan on seeing this summer. I hope to meet many more people this summer and become very good at Chinese.

I actually just got back from driving to NYC to get my visa, because I do things the hard way. I stopped in Chinatown while I was there and ate at the Old Sichuan restaurant. It tasted just like food in China, except I have never seen Broccoli in China, but oh well. The waitress didn’t know much English, so I was happy to use the basic Chinese that I know to talk to her and tell her about my food allergies. I think she was impressed that we could have a small conversation, but I think she ended up calling me 过敏(guo min)，or “allergy” which was really funny.

I feel lazy today, so I’m not going to write any more for now. I’ll probably write again during my flights since it takes forever to get there and I can never sleep on airplanes. I haven’t even started packing yet so that seems like a good idea.