welcome to china.

I made it. I'm here. Beijing is my new place of residence until August 26.

After a great great 4th of July (in my opinion, the best "last day" to have before leaving the country), I awoke at 4:30 on the 5th to get to O'Hare. I took a four hour flight to Vancouver (magically, I had an entire row to myself), sat in Vancouver's stunningly beautiful airport for about 3 hours (flight delayed about an hour and a half), took another 11 hour flight to Beijing (not as bad as I thought), met some fellow Boilers at the airport and took a taxi-van to our dorm (yes, here they call it a dorm... though I can't stop calling it a residence hall). All of these travels took me about 24 hours... I think.

To be honest, I had no clue what time it was, what day it was or when I was supposed to be sleeping since I left Lowell. I think I figured it out though, and thanks to frequent cat-naps on the planes, I am pretty well-adjusted.

Beijing is a gigantic city, but everyone lives very locally. We are staying on the campus of the Communications University of China... but we think that anyone can live here, not just students. Nothing within any reasonable distance of us is in English, making finding food a very interesting process. This morning four of us set out to find our first Chinese meal. We walked outside the campus gates (there are, literally, guarded gates--see Mom, Baba, it's safe) and found a pastry shop. By pointing to different things and then showing how many we wanted using our fingers, we managed to secure some food... for about fifty cents USD each. (Holla' at a playa' when you see her eating Chinese pastry in the skreet... it's no NYC, Katie!)

That's about as far as we have come so far. It's hard to explore when you really have no grasp on where you are, or in what direction to head. I hope that our orientation tomorrow will give us all some guidance.