Hello, China…almost!

As the first new blogger to be posting, I just wanted to say that I’m excited to be writing here and can’t wait to share my China adventures with you. I hope that you will enjoy reading my posts and living vicariously through me! So in anticipation of leaving…

While counting down to June 17th, 2009, an otherwise ordinary Wednesday, when it just so happens I will board a United flight for Beijing, I have only recently started to feel the butterflies in my stomach. After I finished finals on the Hilltop, I headed home to Massachusetts to spend a month with family and friends before my departure date. A month, I have discovered, is just enough time to get settled into a routine at home, making it difficult to feel like I’m going anywhere soon!  Since I have been working at the same part-time job that I’ve had since tenth grade, eating as much delicious ice cream as possible, visiting high school friends, and seeing more movies in these few weeks than I did all year on campus, Beijing seems pretty far from my mind at certain moments. My challenge: prepare for seven months of studying abroad in China, but still enjoy my time at home.  Have I succeeded? Well, in preparation for China I have:

1. gotten my Chinese visa. Thankfully I was able to avoid the bureaucratic nightmare that my roommate walked into when during finals, while still in DC, she decided to go to the Chinese consulate in person to secure her visa. Turns out they make you take a number, wait for a few hours, inform you they will be breaking for lunch, then make you take a different number after the midday break and wait all over again. Lovely. Not. After having been thoroughly warned, I decided to pay the extra processing fee for a travel documents company to spare me the headache.  Although I’d like to say that my roommate’s experience with the consulate was a one-time fluke, I anticipate that this is only a preview of what is to come while I’m in China.

2. ordered some Chinese currency (Renminbi, or yuan, or kuai…too many names for money in Chinese!!). That way, I can actually pay for the taxi to the campus of Capital University of Economics and Business (henceforth referred to as CUEB) after I disembark in Beijing, without having to find a place to exchange money after no sleep for seventeen hours. No matter how much I might try to find a comfortable position, I can never seem to sleep on airplanes. Somehow, my exhaustion from jet lag never seems to overcome the discomfort of tray tables, arm rests, and the middle-aged man in front of me reclining his seat into my lap (cross your fingers that last one doesn’t actually happen!).

3. received the necessary vaccinations and gotten my wisdom teeth removed. The wisdom teeth actually ended up being a great excuse to sleep off my post-finals/move-out sleep deprivation without my parents complaining about me not emerging from my room until after 11am. And I’m pretty glad I got my marathon of 3 doctors’ appointments in 4 days over with early into my time at home!

4. started making a binder full of important information for my parents to have while I’m abroad, in a likely-to-be-futile effort to fend off the panic that will overtake my household before I leave. I’m the oldest of two kids in my family, and the first one to study abroad, or even to simply be away from home for seven months at a time, so naturally, my parents are a bit nervous (though they are actually being pretty good at hiding it). This “China binder” is my attempt to collect every important document with information that they might need to know while I’m away.  Needless to say I’m not done yet! It is proving to be a lot harder than it initially seemed in my head when I came up with the idea, but I’m hopeful that it will actually be helpful to them while I’m away.

So, am I ready for China? Well, not exactly.  I am lucky enough to have traveled there before, so naturally, everyone I talk to assumes that I have a pretty good idea of what I am getting myself into, or at the very least, that I have a leg up on the other students who will be studying abroad with me. Though this is true in certain respects, such as already knowing about Turkish toilets, not to tip cab drivers, that Pizza Hut is very high-end dining, and not to drink the tap water, I certainly don’t know everything! In contrast to the assumption previously made by the rest of the world, my advantage having already experienced the buzz of Beijing is a small one, since I don’t really know the exact challenges that will be thrown at me as a student immersed in a new and very different environment.  Whenever I start feeling the butterflies and wondering what my classes will be like, trying to figure out how I will navigate the grocery store and where to buy a cell phone, if I will like my roommate, and endless other things, I try to remind myself that life will throw me curveballs no matter what. In a different language and entirely new culture, it might be a little harder to face this unpredictable pitcher called life, but I still really want to hit those curveballs out of the park.  There are a few things that I’m inevitably nervous about, the tough pitches I can anticipate, such as:

1. speaking only Mandarin, all the time, with everyone. I know that I’ve been adequately prepared through my Georgetown classes, but I’m still pretty nervous. I have been told that my head will really hurt for the first few weeks, if not longer, from the heavy load of sixty new words a day that I must learn (being out of class for a month now makes me feel sometimes like I’ve forgotten everything…even though it’s not true! At least I hope not. Better start studying for my placement exam. NOW.)

2. trying to pack for the changing climate of Beijing. I’ve got two 50-lb suitcases to fill, plus a small roller as my carry-on, and a backpack. Though I know I can buy things once I get there, funnily enough my abstract anxieties about travel always seem to manifest through the very concrete act of deciding what to pack.  My goal when packing is always to be prepared for anything and everything (which, of course, is impossible). We’ll see how that one goes…

3. acclimating my stomach to Asian cuisine. I consider myself willing to take leaps of faith in testing out my dad’s unconventional culinary endeavors (for instance the blueberry corn cake—yes, I know, weird-sounding but it was pretty delicious- for dessert last night), but having food allergies (including the most serious one, peanuts) since I was a small child means that I’ve gotten used to being pretty cautious outside the house, let alone outside the country. My allergies have actually become a good excuse to expand my vocabulary.  My latest project: look up everything I’m allergic to in Chinese and memorize those words. I do have at least one comfort, though, in the face of foods I can’t eat: there’s always RICE!

Aside from feeling a little nervous about the upcoming challenges, I am still super-excited to be embarking on my Study Abroad Experience! Among other things, I am looking forward to: meeting a new group of fellow students (who are from different US schools: my program is run by Hamilton College), making some Chinese friends, honing my bargaining skills at Panjiayuan, Beijing’s “dirt market,” which is full of interesting objects, getting the chance to interview Beijingers for an independent field research project I will do in the fall, checking out the city’s 798 avant-garde art district, and not feeling like a tourist anymore!  I also think that it will be really interesting to be in a post-Olympics Beijing to see how the city (and the country) has changed after its international “coming-out” party last summer. I talked to a friend on Skype who is also studying abroad in China and has already settled into classes in Beijing. Seeing her made me so excited and reminded me just how much I want to be there already! I cannot wait to be done with blending my life at home with preparation for being in China, which is actually a pretty taxing experience. The anticipation of exciting Asian adventures mixed with the lament of leaving the comforts of my fluffy double bed and mess of a room is starting to push my system into overdrive. I have always hated goodbyes, and it will be really hard to leave my parents, brother, boyfriend, friends, and hometown comforts behind, but it is not forever. It is for seven months. And better yet, when you say goodbye to one part of your life, you get to say hello to another. I can’t wait to say,  “HELLO, CHINA!”