Friday, February 22, 2013

Well it is the weekend again. I landed two hours and twenty minutes before my luggage did so that was pretty terrible. They didnt confiscated any of my juggling things although they did take the letter I left in the bag explaining what all of the questionable things were. Many thanks to Thom for pointing me in the right direction on how to travel with props. I ended up getting to my hotel at 2am. Over the past week I have been able to visit Yuyuan Garden, Qibao, Sheshan Mountain, and the Shanghai Financial Building. I have registered at the school but no one knows where I will be living yet... The course list that I got from them today is different than the one I got last semester so it will be interesting to see how I deal with all of this. Now all I need is a place to wash my clothes.... It has been an overall decent week and my Chinese is starting to get a little better.

Friday, February 15, 2013

Pre-Departure freaking out

First off I want to thank Yikun for all of the help he has been giving me. Now I have checked my documents at least seven different times. I am just now about to wash all of my clothes and start packing up. This will be my last day in Orlando. I am almost done getting everything else besides the clothes prepared. Hopefully all of my juggling props are clean enough to fly without being confiscated. I have set up a VPN so that I can use the internet freely. For future reference there are some free options to navigate the Great Fire Wall of China. One free program you can download is Ultrasurf and a website you can go to is "vtunnel.com". However, I do not trust those two things with passwords. You never know. Tomorrow I will print out my flight confirmation and hopefully relax until it is time to leave. I am very excited to be spending six months in Shanghai, but I am definitely going to miss almost everything here.

Friday, February 8, 2013

Well my passport and visa came back in today. My plane ticket is booked for February 17th. This post is basically just making sure I understand how to use this website. I will be trying my best to update this on the weekends.