Planes and automobiles..

Saturday morning I got to the airport at 6am ready for my 730 flight. The crew didn't show up until 745 on account of their hotel transportation not showing up! We got under way and I just barely made my connection to Shanghai. 7 hours into my flight I thought "Oh, we're almost there!" Yeah, right! 14 hours of sitting in a seat next to a very quiet and small Chinese man I was about to scream b.c. I had cabin fever so bad. I liked the way we flew here- from Chicago up to Canada and Alaska, across the Bering Sea, Down through Russia, down between Korea and Japan, and into Shanghai. It was awesome! Customs was a breeze and they just let me right through. At baggage claim I was standing next to two European-descent looking women and I figured they must be with the institute b.c. I wasn't seeing European-descent people anywhere. They also had that teacher look! (You know what I'm talking about! lol) I walked over to them and sure enough they were with my group! whew, what a relief. My roommate was one of them and she is SO nice! Her name is Barbara and she's from Boca Raton. She's 55 and short and blonde and so cute! I really like her a lot so far, which is such a relief. So we meet up with two other girls @ my age then wait to get through security on the way out of the airport which was insanely long. Finally we meet up with the Nanjing University representative, Sebastian, and poor kid had no idea what he was doing! lol. But his efforts were greatly appreciated by all and he's as nice as they come.
(Btw, the toilets- aren't toilets! If you are in a public place and need to go to the bathroom you go to a "Squatter Urinal" which is essentially a male's urinal stuck into the floor! It's absolutely disgusting and god help if you need to take care of any serious business there... No toilet paper, the stench is awful, and let's just say there's no flushing involved so you get a lotta run-off. blech.)
At 7 we jumped on the tour bus for our 5 hour drive to Nanjing! I was like "Are you freaking kidding me?!?" I def. thought it was like 2 hours.. not to mention there's an airport in Nanjing! Why didn't we just fly in there?!? So needless to say it was utterly exhausting and disconcerting to get out of 17 hours of flights to jump on a bus for 5 hours! then try to sleep and get situated at 1am before class starts tomorrow at 8!! goodness sakes. oh well, that's the joy of traveling internationally.
Naturally my first thing was to get the internet working and of course everything on here is Chinese so I don't even know if I'm going to publish this correctly, lol.
I'm looking forward to tomorrow- I like the people so far- it will be very interesting getting to know them.
China is way different, but yet, the same. The people are nice.
It's just amazing and still so surreal.