The First Post

Hey there! Welcome.

My first post - how exciting! I'm half an hour away from embarking on my
9-week trip to China and this will hopefully be a place for me to
document my travels. I'm not sure how the writing here will be -
considering it's be a very long time since I've tried to keep up with my
life in a journalistic manner. Also, it's been a long time since I've
been writing, for pleasure or otherwise. So, be easy on me, readers who
may be of a much background in the use of the English language.
Hopefully, I'll have enough interesting stories to tell that it will
hide the learning curve as I remember how to write - assuming that such
skills ever do come to me.

I plan to write a much more complete introduction to my trip to China
while in transit over the next day (helped along by the time zones
changing - although I won't actually be traveling for 24 hours, I won't
be arriving in China until Tuesday.) Here is the basic idea of things
for now:
A little bit more than a year ago, I was considering my goals for my
freshman year of college and for my experience in college. I began
thinking about how much I wanted to learn Chinese. Fast forward a few
months to my first day of classes at Brown University and my Chinese
professor says something along the lines of "It's never too early to go
to China." The thought, simple as it may be, changed the potential paths
that I saw stretching before me. A few months later, I've researched,
selected and applied to programs to spend the summer in China. studying.
Some hefty payments, some immunizations, a lot of packing later and here
I am.

I am flying first to Washington D.C., then from there across the north
pole to Beijing, China. From Beijing, I will fly to Yantai, where I'll
spend a week with my father - who lives and works there
(oversimplification - he actually travels very frequently but he is
supposedly based in Yantai). After that, I will fly back to Beijing to
study with the Princeton in Beijing program (through Beijing Normal
University.)

My travel companions will be my mother (for the first week, then she'll
stay in Yantai), and the little bird pictured above.

I think that it is time for me to eat some breakfast and contemplate
whether my packing is complete. Hopefully, I'll be updating again from
the other side of the world.