Saturday, July 7, 2012

我第一个星期在中国/My First Week Here in China

你好,我已经到这里!你们还想我吗? 我很想你们!希望你们喜欢这里的博克。我花了好长时间写了。你们应该读一下。没有读的话,我回家的时候会跟我的蝴蝶去你的家!

Oh, hey there. ^^ All this stuff just means hello in Chinese. No need to break out google translate or anything...

So how's America? Fourth of July has come and gone, and not so much as a whisper of a firework here in China. I did get my host family a couple of American flags, but that's about as patriotic as it get's here.

Anyways, you guys are here to hear about me. Right? or just to steal my pictures and my kidneys. Either way, I shall begin.

A wise old man once said (was it Mr. Rogers?) "A picture is worth a thousand words." So I will show a lot of picture and video and try to explain them as best I can.

No comment.
Llamma.


I'll begin at the beginning.
At 3:30 AM on Wednesday morning, I got up and my mom dropped me off at the SLC airport. I said goodbye to my mother, turned around, and faced my destiny... er, the sliding glass doors of my terminal. After getting through security, I met up with the three other people going from Utah. (Tanicca, our fourth, is taking the pic. round of applause.)

From there, we flew to Dallas then to Washington DC. In DC, we went to the best hotel chain in the world... no, really. Embassy Suites is definitely the suitest hotel I've ever stayed in. Period. An awesome courtyard and unlimited bacon in the morning is all I need to say. We had a nice dinner that night, and the next day we spent 12 hours in a conference room learning how not to die or get arrested in China. Fun stuff. No pictures... cough. Unfortunately.


That night, I stayed up until 3:30 where we took a bus to DCA airport and a plane to Chicago then boarded a plane to..... Idaho!
...
I mean China!!!
China! With an interesting flower tree thing we saw on our bus ride.

After we arrived in Shanghai, all those people going to Zhengzhou boarded another four hour plane and then took a bus to a hotel where we immediately crashed. As in fell asleep, not... yeah.
Awkward picture of my cool roommate.


So we left DC 3:30 am Friday morning, and got into Zhengzhou 2:30 Sunday morning (2:30 pm DC time). If you do the math, which I did, that comes to about 35ish hours of pure, unadulterated travel. Fun stuff.



On Sunday, we met our host families, then took a test to place us in levels of difficulty for our Chinese classes. After we got home that night, I gave my fam their presents then hit the rack. We had school the next morning 8 am.
Here are 5 of my six classmates. They're cool. And all of them are crazy good at Chinese.

My school.
Every day we have four hours of Chinese class, then we have lunch (I'll discuss that when I have pictures...) then we have an hour of cultural class, and then sometimes we go out and have a field trip. On Wednesday, we went to the Zhengzhou museum. This museum has some of the oldest Chinese artifacts ever found.

I got a pretty good hipster angle on this picture.


If we don't go on field trips, I'll normally hang out with my host family and play games or talk.

Well, the photos aren't uploading very well, so I guess I'll call it a week. If I have time I'll try uploading more. But until then, 再见!

2 comments:

Miranda said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Miranda said...

我真想念你啊!你应该长长写博客,好吗?