Going to China soon! Oh yea, and I'm studying too.

The travel blog has been revived. At this point I still feel like I'm just traveling to China. I forget that I am actually studying abroad, thus, some learning (on purpose) will need to happen. But not for a few days. Friday night I begin my journey to Beijing by way of Seattle, and hopefully everything will go ok because out of everybody on my program, my flight is the last to arrive! Thankfully there are two others who land at 11pm who will hopefully remember to wait for my 11:40 landing, but it will definitely be an interesting experience to go to sleep on a plane theoretically around 11pm central time and then somehow go to bed again eventually on Chinese time. I'm getting antsy about traveling already, so I've been running around the house trying to wrap everything up before skipping the country. One full day to go and I'm basically all packed, which takes some pressure off! I didn't even have to cut the clothing quantity overtaking the floor in half before loading my suitcase - everything fits! I'm used to traveling lightly, it's still not easy to figure out how to pack three months worth of stuff so it fits on planes and trains etc...

What's coming across the Pacific: a small suitcase, a backpacking backpack, and a small plane bag!


Here's the scoop about my program (for those readers who aren't on it!). It's Carleton's Tianjin Program, our school's Chinese language program. There are 24 of us with Professor Zhao, for whom I have also worked for the past year on his book in addition to other translation things and details about our program. I will be a co-RA (Resident Assistant in the dorms) along with two others on the trip, so that will probably serve as an entertaining challenge. As far as our actual travels, we'll be sightseeing sponges for a few days in Beijing, study in Tianjin for a couple weeks, split into travel groups for midterm break week, study in Shanghai for about a month, and then possibly some wandering at the end of the program to Hangzhou and Suzhou. I also feel extremely lucky to be able to take advantage of being in Asia even further because after my program is done, I get to travel with the parentals for a couple weeks and then visit a couple Carleton friends in Singapore and Malaysia during winter break!

Thank you so much to all my family and friends for your love and support - you guys made this once in a lifetime opportunity possible!

Love,
施凯宁 (Shi Kaining, my Chinese name!)