Zai Jian, America

Hello, friend. I begin this travel blog with feelings of both excitement and nervousness. After months of planning and weeks of anxious waiting I can finally breath easy... sort of. I've secured university placement, housing, and (after much frustration) the proper documents necessary to begin my summer in the People's Republic of China. For three months, I will live with a family in the nation's capital while attending the Beijing Language and Culture University. My goal - to reach a high level of proficiency in Mandarin Chinese. After a bit of thought, I decided to create this blog as a travel diary of sorts. I hope to keep friends and family connected and maybe even teach you, my dear reader, a thing or two about Chinese culture. However, be warned. I am writing this first post in the U.S., and I do not yet know if this site will be blocked by the Chinese government. I do know that this site has been blocked before, but from what I can gather I should be able to access it while in the PRC. This could change at anytime though. I will try to regularly update this page. However, sometimes laziness gets a hold of me, so I can't promise much. Regardless, in a few hours I will be boarding a plane heading for Beijing, leaving my friends, family, and homeland behind. And today I had to say many goodbyes. Yet, as I said my farewells I thought of the word "goodbye" in the Chinese sense . In Mandarin, "goodbye" is a combination of the characters "Zai (again)" and "Jian (to see)," literally meaning "see again" or "Zai Jian." So to all of my friends and family reading this, Zai Jian! See you again!