Apologies for not posting sooner. Turns out China restricts access to Livejournal, and I’m only able to access it after going through a proxy server.

There’s so much to say with so little time. If you’re looking for pictures, look to my Facebook albums. Right now it’s only clubbing because that’s what we’ve primarily been doing for the past 7 days, but at the same time let me tell you that school is rigerous: Four hours of language every day and 2 hours of business classes every TWF. I’m supposed to learn a year’s worth of Chinese language in two months. Insane? I’d wager.

Shanghai itself is massive, very overwhelming and challenging to navigate. Barely anyone speaks English, and I’ve been forced to put my Chinese language learning on hyper drive. It’s working but pretty frustrating because everyone just assumes that I am Chinese and am supposed to understand everything that they’re trying to tell me. I’ve been cut no slack.

These seven days have been one unfortunate event after another for me. First my Calvin Klein bag was stolen with my camera. Don’t assume I was overly careless and waving my bag in everyone’s face to take; rather, the theives were slick and managed to take it without me noticing from right under my nose. The trick to safety is paranoia, and that is going to dictate my behavior in Shanghai for the coming months. Aside from this event, I got food poisoning, an ulcer on my gums, been bitten by ten thousand mosquitoes (which resulted in me having the skin of a leper), and wasted way too much money on clubbing and on non-essentials. I have just assumed that I am prone to physical misfortune throughout this trip, so I might as well suck it up and deal with it.

However, one bright side remains to be said, yet I fear in doing so will negate that goodness. I’ve become very superstitious in the past few years. It’s probably because of my desire to be in control of my own actions. Either way, I just wanted to point out that YES some goodness has come out from being here and is helping me get through each and every day. I pray not to lose it through all these jinxes.

In the end, don’t look for too many postings from me through Livejournal as it was challenging enough just getting on this thing to post this entry. I’ll get back in the swing of things once I’ve hit Thailand on Sept. 2.

GO CHECK OUT MY PICTURES OF FACEBOOK!