“Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget.” When I signed up to study abroad in China it was on a whim. I love to travel and have been going on international adventures since I was in middle school and spent a week with a family in Japan learning about their culture and visiting local schools and sites. I got the travel itch, that feeling of curiosity for anything that’s different. The travel itch turned into my greatest passion in life. I have traveled to several countries in Europe several times on group trips, family [View Full Entry]

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I wrote this essay for my Chinese Culture and Society Class: My May break was spent out of Mainland China. I met up with my dad in Macau while he was there on business. We spent a couple days in The Venetian, exploring the wondrousness that it is. The place is huge with four gaming floors, an entire mall, food court, fancy restaurants, spa, pool/workout facilities, bars and lounges, and of course the hotel rooms themselves. I definitely enjoyed seeing what all the hype of this place was about. However, one can only enjoy the addictiveness of BlackJack for so long, [View Full Entry]

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Written April 25 Everybody studies abroad for an experience incomparable to anything they have ever had before. They want to see a new part of the world, make a new set of friends, have new adventures that they can tell their friends and family back home, and they want to take a step away from whatever it is they know as normal. For some it might be a smaller step and others a giant lunge, but it is my belief that everyone who goes, no matter where that is, still has one foot grounding them back home. Since I’ve been in [View Full Entry]

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Before I left for China everybody asked the question, “why China?” What should have been an easy question to answer was difficult for me. China was a culture and society I knew very little about. My best answer to the question was that I was curious. I wanted to learn more about this huge rising global power, see what it was like to live in such a highly populated country, experience the customs and daily routines of people who lived so differently than myself. The list of reasons went on and on, but there was no one reason that really stuck [View Full Entry]

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February in review: It’s always been my belief that February is the fastest month of the year. Yes, there is the shortage of a couple days, but even with this year having one extra day, February seemed to fly by. I kept writing “update blog” on my to-do list, but clearly never got around to it. So to keep this thing going, I will write a very delayed, but brief summary of what February entailed for me. Feb 2-10: Fuzhou. After our travel seminar to Xi’an, Beijing, and Shanghai, we had a weeklong break for the Chinese Lunar New Year. This [View Full Entry]

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In Shanghai, I was sick. With a group of about 80 people traveling together, germs were bound to be in the air. Then, to add insult to injury, we were traveling through China during the worst storms it has seen in over 50 years. As if cold and snow is not bad enough, the people are not used to it and the cities have no snow plows or effective ways to respond to the snow. Therein lies miserable weather. When we got off the train at Shanghai, we were warned of the crowds we would run into. Because of the storms, [View Full Entry]

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Written: January 29 I am writing from the train to Shanghai. We left Beijing last night around 7pm and will arrive soon in Shanghai, a mere 13 hours later. The week we spent in Beijing was really informative for me. The city is known for it’s working blend of old and new. What was once the capital of several dynasties is now a booming city with some of the most architecturally amazing buildings, many constructed with the Olympics in mind. While the city’s historical aspects can impress anybody on their own, with the new skyscrapers and buildings, the whole city is [View Full Entry]

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Xian Continued. Enjoy the pics! [View Full Entry]

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Just as we started to get settled into our rooms at Tsinghua, we had to pack up again and leave for our two week travel seminar. Led by Caroline, the seminar is a 3-credit class focused on the past, present, and future of Chinese culture. We will travel to three different cities in China representing the three segments of study. For the past, we flew to Xian located in the central area of Northwest China. We got to Xian in the evening and checked into our hotel. Lucky for me, there are an odd number of Beijing girls and I was [View Full Entry]

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It’s fitting that a Chinese philosopher said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” In my Chinese journey, I feel like the past few days have been the tiniest baby step into what is ahead for me. The anticipation and nerves that I felt so greatly before leaving has grown into this feeling of excitement for whatever will come my way. I left from Chicago on Wednesday, January 16 at 12:30pm and arrived in Beijing on Thursday January 17 at 4pm. I was really happy that Michelle and Sarah (the other DePaul girls) were on my flight [View Full Entry]

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