Recap

So, I've been back in the states for a week and a half now. I'm over the jet lag (I actually recover pretty quickly from jet lag, I have a trick for it!) and accustomed to using a fork again. Accustomed to being able to understand all the conversations I hear when I wall down the street. I've moved and already started sorority activities in the short time I've been back...already reunited with my best friends, already done my first homework assignments. It almost feels like I never left. It's a very, very strange sensation.

I feel like I need to explain something about the entries I made while I was in China. I used it very much as a diary, rather than an extended report on the trip. Many of my entries were negative because when I got around to writing I was tired and cranky. I was talking to a friend about this and she said that because we're so close and she knows my writing style well from other blogs, she understood that I was having a good time, but that others might not. When I complained about the trip to Suzho, it didn't mean that I thought it was a terrible day for everyone, it was just bad for me. When I said that there were things that were bad about the Great Wall, it didn't negate or overshadow the awe I felt at standing on one of the 7 wonders of the (medieval) world. I think the message gets lost in my writing or even in my interactions with other people a lot. I loved this trip. It changed my life.

People always ask me on first seeing me or on first finding out that I went to China how it was. How do I answer that? It was phenomenal. I couldn't put the experience into words. I saw the fog on the Mongolian valleys beside the Great Wall of China. I walked through the city where only emperors and the royal family were allowed to live. I made friends with someone who barely spoke the same language as I do. I saw all of Shanghai at once. I saw a pearl pulled out of an oyster. I met important people, I saw so much artwork, I was treated like royalty. But I don't want to tell that story. Everyone had that experience on our trip. I want to tell people that after walking around Beijing for a day in sandals, my feet were almost completely black. I want to say that everything I thought about traveling has changed. I want to say that at once I gained an overwhelming reverence for my home country and an undying desire to leave it permanently. I want to tell people how you can tell where the bathrooms are from a block away, except in Shanghai where western toilets were much more common. I don't know where to start. I don't know how to condense my experience into soundbites someone will listen to. I know that I will never, never forget this trip.

I think the best I can do is thank Ying and Edwin for all they did for me and the other students. Thank the other students for being so fantastic and turning this experience into one that was a ton of fun. And thank my friends for pushing me when I wanted to back out.

This would be the part where I put more pictures, especially of the work from our Shanghai critique, but unfortunately, my camera is not cooperating with me, so that will have to wait for a week or so.