Here

Well... I'm here.

It's currently 6:00am I'm sitting in a somewhat spartan room on campus at Tsinghua after a very, very restless night of sleep. We're talking maybe 3 or 4 hours tops, broken into 1 hours chunks. I've never really had serious jet lag before, but hopefully it'll dissipate in the next day or so.

I'm in China. Bloody hell, it's just sort of hitting me now. I am the only Caucasian person I have seen so far on campus (except maybe for a runner last night). It's a totally new experience being a visible minority in a country where you don't have a decent command of the language. I've been to a few different countries before, but always with my hand held or with fluency in their language.

Here I'm sort of on my own. I've used Mandarin a lot over the last 10 or so hours since I arrived. It's difficult because my spoken mandarin is decent enough in that everyone I've talked to understands me, but their responses are damned near impossible for me to make out. I say something nice and simple like

Ni3hao3, ce2suo4 zai4 nar3? (Hello, where is the washroom?)

They rattle off something that's about 15 words long and I catch 1 word. I ask them to slow down and I get a look like they are scared of me.

It's frustrating to be this helpless, but I'm guessing it'll get better. I'm curious about what the campus looks like in the daytime. I wandered around for an hour last night looking for toilet paper of all things. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to mime 'toilet paper' to a group of 18 year old girls because you don't know the words?

I'll hopefully get a bike today and a bank card. I'm also hoping to snag a phone so text messaging is a reality.

Anyhow, lots on my mind and more to do.

Hope everyone is well,

Nathan