Day One

This past month I have spent more time flying and sitting in airports than I ever have. From Boston to Detroit to Shanghai to Beijing to Xiamen to Shanghai to Detroit to Boston to Jacksonville to Fort Lauderdale to Detroit and finally back to Shanghai! This is my fourth time coming to China and it seems I won't be leaving until my Visa expires sometime July 2011. So I lost my weekend coming here to a five hour layover in Detroit spent napping in the Delta Sky Lounge, which, my father deemed necessary to pay 90 USD to use for three hours. What you got for the money was nicer seats to relax in; all you can eat apples and cookies; all you can drink coffee, apple juice, and orange juice; and the use of a shower. I'm not really sure we got our money worth but it's nice to feel slightly fancy every once and a while.To kill the last bit of time before the flight to Shanghai I purchased Stephen King's new book, Under The Dome. It's 1000 plus pages of Kingyness and I only managed to get 200 pages in before landing. The reason behind that was two glasses of wine and two benodryl that knocked my ass out for nine of the fourteen hour flight. There weren't any in flight movies that I particularly wanted to watch or hadn't already seen. So I spent the fourteen hours just listening to music, sleeping, reading, and playing a little bit of Dragon Quest IX on the DS. The Pudong International Airport was surprisingly empty and we made it through customs shortly. I was worried that I would be given a hard time because of the lack of resemblance of myself to my passport picture. In my passport I have my head shaved and no facial hair and now I look the complete opposite. When I flew to Shanghai in May the customs agent didn't believe my passport picture nor my driver's license looked anything like me. It is baffling to me as to how I don't look like myself. How can I not look like myself? Alright well I got a bit off track. Even though we quickly made it through customs our bags were almost the very last ones to come out. It must have had to do with our five hour layover in Detroit(Whoever is the travel agent for my parents is absolutely terrible). The school is nice enough to provide us with our own van and driver who met us at the gate and helped bring our half a ton of luggage down to the parking garage and load it into the van. Stepping outside of the airports meager air conditioning and into the humidity almost made me feel I never left Florida. About 45 minutes later we are at our apartment and throwing all of our shit in the door as fast we can. I managed to sprain my wrist playing dodge ball two days before this flight so it made hauling the luggage around all the more fun. I quickly set up sheets on my mattress and grumpily asked my parents where some shit or another was. I was in dire need of sleep and I felt crappy from my drug induced coma on the plane.

After falling asleep pretty early I then also rose way too early to help with readjusting to the timezone change. I was up at 3 AM and went back to tackling the beast of Stephen King Novel. I managed to fall asleep again around 7 AM only to be woken up by my father an hour or so later. We biked through town and checked out how the construction of the school was going. They are fixing both of the gyms on campus and it looks like they won't be finished by the time school is in session. Biking around town it really hit me that I'm really here to stay in Shanghai. I'm excited to start getting into the grind of things. Until then I need to buckle down on my Chinese studies and get into decent shape by the time school starts in August. The cicadas symphony of buzzing has yet to stop and I doubt it will until the heat dies down. It's currently a pleasant temperature of 99 Fahrenheit but with the heat index it feels like 114 degrees outside. I'm running out of time now I must be off to downtown for dinner and to most likely get my own cellphone. Hopefully most of my thoughts have been coherent as I won't be able to reread or edit anything I wrote.