A Quick Update

Hello to all who are reading this blog! 你们好我的朋友！As it says in the title, this blog is mainly an attempt for me to keep a journal of my adventures whilst living in Suzhou, China at Soochow University. I honestly would have started updating the first day, but I'll get to that part of the story in the minute.

After a hard farewell to my mother (whose reassuring words did more than I think even she knows), I managed to get past security and on my way onto the plane. The flight to San Fransisco was relatively mundane: no peanuts, a little something to drink, and a slightly annoying woman next to me. It was peaceful...until we landed. Upon our arrival in San Fran, our pilot informed us our gate was being occupied by another aircraft, and it would be awhile until we could get off the plane. There were two problems with this: one, I had to pee REALLY badly, and two, the flight that took me to China was boarding in less than twenty minutes. We (my friend Charlie and I) managed to get off the plane with just seven minutes to run to the other side of the airport to the international terminal, go through security AGAIN, and try and find our terminal. When we did, we were quickly informed that our flight had been delayed by an hour. Both lucky and unlucky. Lucky, in the sense that we needn't have run as far and as quick as we did and now we could take a break (aka, I could go PEE!), but unlucky in that our fellow abroad students were now going to have to wait an extra hour for our arrival. But oh well, there was nothing we could do.

The flight itself to Shanghai was, again, uneventful. The most common conversation started was, "So why are you going to China?" I played my DS, read my Chinese textbooks, and ate most of the way, trying very hard not to sleep so that my schedule wouldn't be messed up by a four hour "nap". I succeeded by only taking an hour and a half nap. Upon our arrival in Shanghai, we actually had to take another hour getting through customs and the border patrol, showing our visas I have no idea how many times. Finally, we met up with 冯老师 outside of the gates, and proceeded to get on a van to Suzhou University.

I'll have more to tell later. Right now, I have another adventure to go on, which I will of course write about. :)

再见！
杜楷