only in china...

Hello my American friends and family!! I finally hacked into blogger.com and figured out how to get my blog to work! I AM SO HAPPY! It's taken days to get the internet to work, and hours to figure out how to hack into facebook and our blogs. So many websites are blocked here thanks to their crazy communist government.

I know you are all dying to hear all of my crazy stories and adventures. There are already so many! Only in the 3 days that I have been here! Where do I begin??

I will start with our 13 hour bus ride from Beijing airport to the city of Weihai, where our school is located. Thats right, after about 25 hours of plane travel we had another 13 hours of bus travel ahead of us. Luckily it was a private tour bus with just our group. We all got our own rows so that helped and we were able to sleep most of the way. But after about 6 hours we stopped in this random town for dinner. And by random I mean, poor and dirty beyond anything you can imagine. All of us just looked at each other like, "Do we have to get off?". The Chinese principal of our school was on the bus with us so he was the one who took us to this town for dinner. Not the best first impression of my China experience. They took us into this building that was apparently a restaurant. We walked up the stairs into these private rooms where they had tables set up. We split up into the rooms and sat down to eat. Then, they brought the food...and didn't stop. There were about 10 plates of different and "interesting" dishes. We were seriously dying. It was hilarious to see what they were going to bring next. Whole shrimp with eyes, weird salad that looked like weeds, some tomato and egg mixed together on a plate, crawdad shrimp looking things with eyes and sharp shells, whole fish deep fried with the head still on, clams in a big bowl, jellyfish cabbage soup, and some other weird dish that I can't even describe. Some of the girls tried everything but I couldn't do it. This girl Lauren and I kept making eye contact from across the table and just start cracking up because we just didn't know what to do. I tried the deep fried whole fish with the head and it was ok. They brought out rice at the end so I ate that. That was a fun experience...haha.

We finally arrived at our school at 4am. Lugged our heavy bags up 10 flights of stairs and settled into our rooms. We each have our own room with a clean water jug to drink, a bathroom (little toilet and a shower head on the wall so water sprays everywhere), a bed without a mattress because they don't have those here, a desk, and internet that now works! So it's pretty nice. We heard that the other schools in China are nothing compared to what we have so we are very grateful even though it's pretty ghetto.

The school is HUGE! The first day we walked around and ran into this little 15 year old chinese boy. He speaks a tiny bit of English and soon became our good friend! We gave him an English name, Bobby, and he loved it! He showed us around the school and tried so hard to talk to us in English. Every time we see him we yell, "BOBBY!!" and he gets so excited. All his Chinese friends get jealous that he is friends with the American girls and they always start laughing.

The people here are amazing in every way. Not only are they so so so nice but they are hilarious. They love us and cannot stop staring. But not in a creepy way, it's more of a admiration stare. I feel like such a movie star! Every time we walk into the cafeteria we call it the "walk of fame" because everyone turns from their food to stare and watch us walk by. We just smile and say, "Ni Hao!" and they say "Hellllooo!" back to us. It's great.

I am having such a wonderful time so far! It was pretty hard at first but we have been getting more settled in and getting familiar with the town and the stores around us. The girls in my group are so great. There are about 6 of us that are already getting close and it's so nice to have people to vent and talk to and laugh with about all of our funny experiences.

I can't upload pictures for some reason but I will try and figure it out. Facebook doesn't really work here either which is so hard for me! haha! I can log in but I can't comment or update pictures or anything. But maybe it will be a good break?

More stories to come! and hopefully pictures! Zaijian!