I have a lot to write down, here, but very little to say articulately. I tried to talk about China once already, but just wound up saying: "China. China China China. Yup. Good." A lot happened in China, and a lot has happened since I got back from China, and a lot is still to happen, and I'm a teensy bit overwhelmed with all of these little details.

So, as for China: Beijing airport is modern and sprawling, as they say. My luggage was lost or stolen somewhere along the way and Air Canada is presently processing a claim for monetary damages. For the first few days I had no underwear or clothing (other than what I was wearing) and our hostel was about as cold as the weather outside (only because our heater was apparently broken). And, of course, me being me, I got sick. Really sick. High fever, nausea, sinus infection, sore throat, the works. Me being me, I refused to admit how sick I was, and Josh and I repeatedly fought over what we were doing and when we were doing things. It went like this:

Josh: Let's go see the Great Wall!
Emily: Okay. Well...I don't feel so good.
Josh: Really? So bad you can't go see the Great Wall? We're in Beijing!
Emily: I know. But I don't feel good.
Josh: Are you sure?
Emily: Okay, fine, let's go see the Great Wall.

JOSH and EMILY exit hostel room. Outside is slightly colder than inside and EMILY immediately runs out of kleenex and becomes absolutely miserable and mopey. 20 feet from the front door she insists they turn around, after much insistence that it's all JOSH'S fault that they left in the first place. Which is certainly not the whole story.

That was Beijing. We did manage to get to the Temple of Heaven and Pearl Market (where they market more than just pearls, and we found me some overpriced socks). We also had several drugstore and clothing-finding adventures (most of which I cried through, due to pants fitting weirdly and being cold), found sore throat tea (bitter tea is best for sick people), rode on the back of a motorbike through a hutong, and got ripped off at a really beautiful tea ceremony.

So Beijing was really okay, if a bit rocky, but Qingdao went much better. Qingdao is lovely. Qingdao is peaceful. Within a few days of antibiotics I was pretty much back to normal, except for going through half a box of kleenex every day.

I'm going back sometime between now and July. Hopefully in May. We'll see whether I really make it through my information technologies/statistics class...

I haven't been paying attention to the world ("real world," I think they say, fingers making bunny-ear quotation marks), but for good enough reason.

I accidentally missed my first day of class (library class) on Monday. Whoops. But they haven't given me my money yet, anyway, so what's a girl to do?

This is what has happened:

Immediately after getting back from China, despite all my good intentions of catching up with the people I care about, I wandered halfway across the country instead. To interview for a PhD in English at a lovely, respectable Midwestern university. Thank God. I'm saved. As of the Third of February, I'm unofficially a graduate student - this, of course, is provided the dean rubber-stamps the department's recommendation to admit me. I am, of course, slightly paranoid (still) that something will go wrong...but what could go wrong?