Preparations

Working as an engineering intern for the past 10 weeks has provided me with great a great source of income and professional experience for the summer. But about 2 weeks ago, I finished the big project that they had me working on. Since then, I've been doing some odd jobs here and there, but for most of the day, I just kill time in my cubicle. Right now is a prime example. Preparations for the trip have served as a great way to pass the time, as I surf around the web looking for information on different places I might want to visit, email back and forth with my equally-bored-with-her-summer-employment friend and travel companion, Nora, and set up this blog.

So I've decided that while I'm in China on my term abroad for the next three months or so, I'll post entries here for the double purpose of keeping track of my own memories as well as for the interest of friends, family, and stalkers at home that might want to keep updated on my experiences as they happen. I'll try to post regularly, so long as my daily life in Shanghai provides a steady stream of new and fascinating experiences worthy of writing down. I'll have my laptop with me, and I think there will be internet access in my dorm room (which, by the way, looks nicer than most dorm rooms I've seen at Union).

Passports, visas, and plane tickets are all taken care of. Tomorrow will be my last day of work, after which I will have until August 31 to pack.

The program I will be traveling with is a Union College term abroad, during which I will study at Fudan University in Shanghai along with 4 other Union students as well as international students from around the world. I'll take Chinese language classes (taught in Chinese, of course) along with the other international students from around the world, as well as a culture course about the Silk Road that is set up by Union. Sometime during the term is a week-long Chinese national holiday, during which there will be no class at Fudan, so we will be going on a field trip to western China to see some of the silk road history there. The program at Fudan is supposed to end on November 28th, but Nora and I have scheduled our return flight for December 12th so that we have some time to travel on our own after school. One of the original ideas was to go hiking in the Three Gorges (for those of you who don't know about the Three Gorges Dam project, you should definitely read up on it... its a fascinating story regardless of your interest) before they are flooded. I have no idea how realistic this plan is, as it's hard to find any information about travel in the gorges that isn't about the Yangtze river cruises, but we'll figure it out when we get over there. Tibet was a brief possibility, but decided against after the realization that it's cold in Tibet in December. Hong Kong is also big in the tentative plans as sort of a vacation for ourselves after the program, as it has warm weather, beaches, and many tourist-friendly, English-speaking attractions that will surely be a welcome break after 10 weeks speaking Chinese. Or maybe I'll be fluent by then. Or not.

Hopefully I will have something a little more exciting to talk about in the next post. This one was a bit long and boring simply because of the fact that that's how the past few days at work have been. I'll try to put a test picture in the next one, just to see how that looks.

That's all for now.