Return to China 回来中国 - Summer 2008

I’ll be flying home on the 26th to go to Manhattan with Devin and look for some apartments, next fall I will be attending New York University. After that I will be flying to Shanghai out of Boston on the 1st. I’ll spend two nights partying out in Shanghai and staying with a friend who is studying abroad at Fudan University. Then I will take the train to Xi’an to stay with my friend Mengmeng and her family for about three days before I go to Beijing and begin my six weeks intensive language course.

Xi’an is known as one of the most important cities for China’s cultural history and is one of the Four Great Ancient Capitals of China of China. Xi’an is also famous for being the start of the Silk Road from China to the Mediterranean and for the location of the Terracotta Warriors! I am really grateful to be able to meet the family of a good friend and see this great city.

While in Beijing I will be hitting the books hard to become more proficient at Mandarin. I will be taking class for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. A total of 120 hours of instruction which is about the same as two semesters of Chinese at Iowa State. I am lucky that my Chinese teacher, 李老师， who I have had for the past year lives in Beijing. She is going to show me all of the cool places and restaurants in the city. I’m going to be careful because she’ll probably try and get to me eat something crazy or say something really stupid to some people because of all of the jokes I played on her during the school year.

In addition, my really good friends Yu Pang and Yu Yang will be in Beijing this summer. They are American and grew up in Iowa but when they went to college their parents moved back to Beijing so they are spending the summer there. Having them in the city with me means I am going to have no trouble hitting up many of the bars and enjoying the nightlife. I’m going to have to be careful that they don’t distract me from my studies.

The 2008 Olympics will be taking place in Beijing while I am there, so I am looking forward to seeing what the city will be like during the biggest event in the world in four years. I want to get tickets to the gold medal wrestling matches and a few matches for ping pong. Also, I’m trying to think of something I can sell a million of for $1 to all of the people while they are in the city, if anyone has any ideas let me know!

That’s all for now

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Summer 2008, Beijing Olympics, China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.