New video series!

It's really hard for me to make this a blog that isn't exclusively about food. China has so many unique foods and flavors that I know I won't be able to find back home, most of it has been aMMMazing, and some of it has been.... a good experience. I'll make these videos as often as I can (no promises as to how man I upload with the wifi here being what it is, but I'll try to put up as much as a I can)

For my first culinary adventure I decided to be healthy and try a some fruit: http://youtu.be/_WJogJrg2R0 (you also get to meet my roommate LaiLai)

Life at the dorm

Check out this video of what dorm life is like for a foreign student on Shaanxi Normal University's campus: http://youtu.be/wVWF7bO_3Fs

Our resident director said that for the average chinese student at SNU, there are 7 or 8 people to a room and that there is no bathroom. They have to walk outside everytime they want to take a shower! The foreign dorms are a lot more upscale as you can see.

Leaving Beijing

It's been a week since I left Beijing (and updated this blog) and arrived in Xi'an. Here's a very brief look into what my last two days in Beijing were like:

On my first full day in Beijing, The Alliance staff gave us a health and safety briefing followed by a tour of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. Then we went to a street that is known for selling exotic foods like starfish, seahorses, and scorpions to name a few.

The next day we took a bicycle rickshaw through a traditional Hutong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutong) and ate a meal that one of the locals cooked for us! Then we needed to go to the train station to get on our overnight train that would take us to Xi'an.

Sorry there are no pics, the wifi is too slow for them to upload :(

Arrived in Beijing

Success! I've figured it out (for this video at least). This video was taken the day I arrived in Beijing. As you can tell I'm pretty jetlagged.

Technical difficulties...

So I wanted this blog to be more video intensive since making a video takes way less time than writing a whole summary for you guys. (plus watching videos is more entertaining) But I'm running into a lot of trouble uploading the videos without youtube. I tried uploading one today about my arrival in Beijing and first impressions, but the video won't upload straight to blogger since it's more than 100 MB :( I even tried condensing it using iMovie but it was still 142 MB after the conversion. idk. If anyone has any ideas then be sure to comment below.

Time to Depart

My flight is tomorrow. I'm going to be leaving Boston at 7:30 AM (which means we're leaving from the house around 3:30) and I've got a layover in NYC before flying into Beijing. I've still got a few things to do, like finish packing and printing out my tickets. But other than that, nothing much. I'm way more prepared for China than I was this time last week. Here's a video from a week ago when I had just come home to RI after spending the summer interning in Washington DC.