Justin's Tale: a Wintertime Classic

Ok, well you know how I said I'd post the next chapter "soon"?  Yeah... well it's been a long time... Actually, I was hoping to post this one just a few days after posting the last one, but this just took me an especially long time to write (which doesn't necessarily mean it's good). Since I started this chapter: over a month has passed, I've walked on the Great Wall, I've braced for four typhoons (nothing serious), and I've begun attending a Chinese school. None of the above I even touch in this chapter, so while it's long, it hardly even scratches the surface of what I have seen and what I have done and what I have learned. Anyway, here it is: Chapter 2: Hel-lo Hai-kou Wow, this is difficult. Where do I even begin... I've been in Haikou for 3 weeks now, and it's finally beginning to feel pretty uncomfortable. Yay! Ok, well, I don't mean uncomfortable in the obvious sense like with the food, and the weather, and my wooden plank of ...

As of today   yesterday  two days ago (haha it took me a while to finish this) it has been 24 days since my last blog post, 2 weeks since I left Minneapolis, and now 1 week since I first arrived at my final destination of Haikou, Hainan. What have I been up to this whole time?  Well, to be honest, I don't remember much about the days leading up to my departure other than that shortly after sharing my first post about "feeling neither 'excited' nor 'nervous'" I began freaking out as it finally hit me that I was leaving my house and family for 10 months   straight , and all I had packed was a box of cereal and maple syrup! Then you might assume that it was a "good scared," and that as I was getting more and more nervous about leaving I was also getting more and more excited about going... wrong! I don't think it ever actually hit me that I was going to China while I was still at home, and so that excitement was nonexistent (I think it had worn ...

Lately, the people who have already heard of my plans for the next school year have all been asking me just about the same thing: "are you excited, or are you scared?" It's a perfectly reasonable question, and is seemingly easy enough to answer; It is also perfectly reasonable for people to assume that I feel either excited or nervous about my long-anticipated departure. And yet, as I find myself only 10 days away from leaving my home for 10 months to live in a place I've been dreaming about for the past four years, I struggle to find the words to describe exactly how I feel at this moment. So when people ask me how I am feeling I just respond, "I don't really know... It's still so surreal." For those of you who do not already know, I'm about to leave the country to spend my junior year of high school in The People's Republic of China. Simply going to China has been a dream of mine for years, and anyone who knows me well knows how long and ho...