Finally in Beijing

So much has happened since my last post, but I will try to sum up the most important and interesting pats of what have happened so far. The first leg of my journey began with my flight to NYC, which was a delightful flight. Jetblue had directTV screens on the head rests of every seat, so I watched live TV for the entire flight. The two woman sitting next to me, who apparently were martini slurping socialites, knew my aunt, which was rather odd. When I finally did arrived at JFK, I was disappointed at the condition of the airport. For my entire life, I had been led to believe that JFK was a world-class airport. Frankly, I would take the NOLA airport over the Jetblue terminal in JFK any day. After passing through my crumbling surroundings into the bowels of JFK, I arrived the Jetblue luggage carousel, and to my great delight found my first bag on the conveyer belt. To my great horror, my second bag never appeared. Myself and a flock of angry New Orleanians headed to the Jetblue Luggage Assistance area. The five employees seemed scared, to say the least, at the site of the angry mob approaching. After half of us had filled out missing luggage forms, we were told that our luggage was in fact now coming to carousel 4. Apparently the luggage guys were just too lazy to finish unloading all of our bags? I arrived at my hotel in Jamaica, NY one hour and 30 minutes later than I expected and found that I had missed the entire orientation. However, I was informed that I didn't miss much. After a dinner of pizza at 6:30 with all of my new traveling companions, a trip was taken to purchase some adult beverages. I really thought I was going to be shot multiple times on my walk with Muh to the local convenient store. I give Jamaica, NY two thumbs down. So with beverages in hand, the night ended watching a disappointing football game.
The next morning started with breakfast in the lobby and a bus ride to the airport. Despite my comments about the Jetblue terminal of JFK, the international terminal of JFK was incredibly nice, and our plane actually left on time. Seeing as the flight was 13 hours, this was definitely a good thing. My time was spent watching movies, reading an entire novel, 2 magazines, listening to music, eating 2 meals (asian chicken noodle thing and penne pasta with red sauce), eating multiple snacks, and being scared quite thoroughly. As I stared at the interactive map of our flight, the pilot announced that we had a medical emergency on the plane, and that a doctor was needed at the front of the plane. "Great, now we get to land in Alaska to get this dieing person off our plane," I thought. Thankfully, whoever was in need either passed away or recovered, because we made no such stop. We then arrived in Tokyo, where the Wake Forest kids all stretched their legs and I got my first meal in Asia, a bowl of noodles with tempura shrimp. Once again, our flight to Beijing left on time. Once in the air 100% of the CET students had fallen asleep including myself. I awoke to a puddle of drool on my t-shirt (don't worry, it was mine) just in time to enjoy my third plane meal of the day, which was noodles, some sort of beef and some really weird Japanese stuff.
Upon arrival in Beijing, we all trudged through customs and retrieved our bags without incident. We were then led out of the international terminal into the waiting area for arriving passengers, where we were confronted with easily 2000 Chinese people waiting to pick up someone. Ben, the American who is in charge of organizing the CET CNU program waved us over and split up our group. One group was going on to a city 14 hours to the north by train. The rest of us were handed information packets, which contained room keys and lots of other useful information. We then waited for about 40 minutes until our two buses arrived, one for our luggage and one for the people. The people bus was a large white beast, which jumped over bumps in the highway like a frog on speed and nearly ran over half of the smaller motorists in its path. Needless to say, we arrived at Capital Normal University safely. The next step was getting up the elevator to our rooms, which were all either on the 4th or 5th floor. My room, on the 4th floor has a nice view of the basketball courts, tennis courts, soccer fields, track, and numorous high-rises outside of the international campus. After settling in for a few minutes, Muh and I headed upstairs to meet the fifth Wake Forest student in Beijing, John, who had come a few weeks earlier to stay in Shanghai with his friend's family. After about an hour of chatting about our different journeys, it was time for some sleep. After finally falling asleep, I awoke at 6:30 in the morning to take a shower and head down to have some breakfast with the rest of the group. The breakfast was odd to say the least. It consisted of the following: boiled peanuts, a processed meat, boiled eggs, a bread filled with pork (very tastey), and rice pouridge. At the end of the meal, one last piece of processed meat remained on the lazy suzanne device. So, I took advantage of the situation and grabbed the last piece with my chopsticks. At this point everyone was quietly wondering what to do next, and so everyone was watching me pick up my spam treat. So, of course I managed to drop it into my lap before it ever reached my mouth. That's always a good way to impress people. We then headed upstairs to a classroom where we were oriented further and given yet another form of identification by the university. Then came the fun part of the day, the tour of the surrounding city. The weather was amazingly sunny and clear. It did get pretty warm on our walk, but the end of the journey ended at the Bank of China, which made it all worth while. I finally had money! We returned to campus just in time to enjoy a free lunch at the cafeteria, which was a shared meal, like our breakfast, on a lazy suzanne. The food was amazing, we had chicken, pork, vegetable and tofu dishes. All were incredible. I then had just enough time to purchase my internet service for the dorm and set it up. Then came the horrible part of the day, the placement test. I got demolished. Oh well. Then it was time for some Wu Mart action. What is Wu Mart you may ask. It's basically a mini walmart that has anything that you could need.That's been my adventure so far. We are on our own for dinner tonight, so hopefully I'll be having even more tastey food this evening and some chinese beer. I'll try to upload some pictures, but the internet is really slow here, so it may take a while....sorry.