Its China Time!

I'm finally here!

Its actually been a while, couple days or so, but free time seems to be very rare in the program as we've come to learn, and jet lag (although mild) demotivates blogging with extreme vigor.

So when we arrived in the airport i was extremely pleased that we landed in the new terminal intended for the Olympic visitors that are already starting to show up. I have yet to find out who designed it but i remember reading somewhere it might be Norman Foster. Regardless...it was very neat being inside.

Here's some pictures...






























here's a rendering of the whole terminal that was just recently added...















Some people argue its looks like underwear, others say it was intended to be a red dragon, whatever, i guess good art always causes controversy. We were told Beijing will be extremely sunny, humid and hot. We arrived at a Beijing definitely hot and humid but also extremely overcast. Our director explained its common to rain during the summer in Beijing, and have some misty days, but nothing like what were experiencing now, weather reports predict an entire week of overcast weather still to come...and more rain. Its not such a bad thing, considering we've already knocked out three major historic sites during the cool weather: tianmen square, the summer palace and the temple of heaven.

Our program is in correspondence with NCUT (north china university of technology), a very prestigious university in Beijing that has a comparable enrollment as cal poly but has a much denser environment, same amount of students, much smaller campus. Each one of us has a Chinese partner that's suppose to help us out on campus and show us our way around town. I was first motivated to go on the trip by my chinese American friend Owen at cal poly. Hes a good friend of mine, we're with each other all the time, some people think were a couple.

This is him sleeping on the plane...
















He's fluent in Chinese so i don't really need a Chinese partner. When we were assigned our partner, we realized she wasn't too interested, come to think of it, we really haven't seen her after orientation day. Haha! But instead two other students that weren't assigned to anyone have started hanging out with us, they're really nice and we've hung out a couple times already.

Here's us playing pool...

















This is Monica, her real name is Wang Fu Li, but for some reason we call her Monica. Shes nice, and good at 8-ball to say the least.

I guess that's all for now, ill post about our first three trips soon.

Zai Jian for now!

Ehsaan