Back in the US...A

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to keep up this blog now that I'm not in China... I can't see there being much of an audience out there for reading about my life in the US. I feel like China was the main selling point of the first attempt. Andy wants me to keep it up, but I figure he'd be the only one to read it and I tell him everything anyway, so what's the point?

Aaanyway, I got back wicked late Thursday. My flight from Harbin to Beijing was delayed three hours cause of some wicked thunderstorms on Wednesday night in Harbin. I had about an hour before my flight once I got to Beijing, so I wandered around the airport a while, browsed the duty-free shops that were incredibly expensive. The flight to Newark was not so bad... I watched Ghandi, Leatherheads, The Motorcycle Diaries, three episodes of Friends, three episodes of the Xfiles, and one episode of Flight of the Conchords (great show, you should watch it), and I read 100 pages of my book and played some sudoku. I was able to watch all that cause my seat had an entertainment system, jet-blue style, for freeeee. Made my inability to sleep on planes ok. Flight to Portland from Newark was delayed cause oh yeah, I loathe the state of New Jersey. I finally landed a little after midnight, exhausted and smelly (really smelly), and in need of a nap.

Sleep-wise I'm still not 100%, but I'm going to Salem tomorrow for the weekend, tropical storm and torrential downpours nonwithstanding. I'll eventually be on the right time.

Photos from China:The view from my hotel room (what I saw for two and a half weeks). The strip on the left is where the internet cafe, corner stores, and restaurants I lived out of are. The campus of the university is between the first and second cranes you see above the shops and stuff. There are a lot of cranes in China. The house next door to the hotel was gorgeous, but i never found out who lived there.This was the view straight off my balcony. A nice mud puddle, and an adjacent University's dorms. Straight below me there was construction work on some underground pipe thing that was kind of annoying the first night but I learned to sleep through when they went to work at 5am.


Wednesday night i took all the english teachers out for dinner at a restaurant near the University. From left to right, Candy, Crystal, Tiana, 凯丽, Kelly, Vera, Sun, Jessie, and Betty. As my mom said, I stick out like a sore thumb. I did, as you can see, finally find out the characters for the chinese name they gave me (its pronounced Kai-Li). The plate in the foreground was made of amazing. And by amazing, I mean fried and sugary and buttery pumpkin skins. Amazing. I had a really great last night because all of these guys were so helpful and friendly and did whatever they could to make me feel at home while I was there... It was just that I didn't have the living conditions to actually stay there, friends or none. I definitely won't forget them.

So it's 12:36am and I'm not getting any better at this sleep schedule thing. I'll post another (bigger) round of photos after I get back from Boston, stuff like the apartment and some cool areas of downtown.