Today has been a great day. This morning I went to McDonalds and had the weirdest breakfast sandwich ever. It was a hamburger bun, rounded-processed egg with cheese, ketchup and mayonnaise. At least it was easy to order- ‘Yi’ (pronounced ‘ee’) which means one… Then I went to Carrefour, a supermarket, and bought a prepaid mobile. Now I can call the two friends I made yesterday. At 12, after a short nap, I met with Zhou Chenyu and his father, and we headed to the Old City. After plowing around for half an hour with Chenyu, his father finally caught up [View Full Entry]

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I’m really frustrated right now. I would kill to have someone to talk to, but that proves to be more difficult than expected. I bought a phone card this morning. See, there are two phones in my room, and both have ring tones. After dialing more than 4 digits on one of the phones, I get an error signal. The other phone has a card slot, and my documentation tells me to go buy a 201 card from the front desk to make the phone work. So I went to the front desk; they tell me that they don’t have any. [View Full Entry]

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I watched the Bourne Ultimatum last night to help me stay awake a little longer. I want to adjust my timer to where I wake up between 6 and 8 AM. The movie didn’t help. My night, though much warmer and more comfortable than my first night, was full of vivid chase dreams. I’ve woken up twice now, both times because my dreams took a wrong turn (they were exciting, like the movie). It’s now 4 AM and I’m not sure if I can fall back asleep. Maybe I’ll study some Mandarin, or perhaps an early morning walk is in order. [View Full Entry]

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Its 6:30 PM on my second day in Shanghai. This morning after making my first entry, I had a lot of stuff to go and take care of. First was breakfast. After asking two guards and one other person where I could find ‘can’ (pronounced ‘tsan’), I finally found the ‘can ting’ (cafeteria). I watched the cook boil noodles in a very large wok then he added potatoes, which were dark like beef. It was mildly spicy and delicious! And it only cost 3 RMB, about 50 cents USD. By far the cheapest meal I’ve had to date. From there I [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday was the longest day of my life. Not that anything bad happened to me- it just was a long day. I watched the sunrise from my flight from Charlotte to Chicago. That was right around 6:00 AM EST. That’s the last thing I remember before waking up during our landing at O’Hare International Airport. From there, I found my next gate to begin my 3 and half hour wait before boarding the massive Boeing 777, which would take me the rest of the way to Shanghai. My flight was understandably uncomfortable, as I was in a small area with about [View Full Entry]

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Two weeks from today I will be on a plane on my way to the other side of the world. Yet I'm not nervous about it at all. I've been hanging out with as many friends as I can, and even developed some new ones in the past weeks. My life feels pretty normal, except for this big, looming adventure that I'm about to face. As I travel around my hometown, I'm paying more attention to architecture, art, and even the people. I remember when I was in Germany that everything seemed so different, yet it all was familiar at the [View Full Entry]

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My name is Bobb Shields and my Chinese name is 谢伯之 (Xie Bo Zhi). I am traveling to Shanghai International Studies University for a semester in China! I leave in the middle of February and won't be back until early July. My intensive study will include reading, writing, and conversing in Mandarin, which spoken by over 1.1 billion people in the world. That's more than double the number of English speakers in the world. (http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm) Many people have asked me why I'm going to China to study, and there are a few answers to that [View Full Entry]

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