Why we should be glad fireworks are illegal in America
Happy Chinese New Year from Beijing
Happy Chinese New Year （新年快乐）from The Study Abroad Blog. The actual start of the Chinese New Year a.k.a. Spring Festival (春节） was the 23rd of January, but since it lasts for 15 days, I think I can say Happy New Year and still be in the clear for another 3 days. Knowing both that it’s the biggest Chinese holiday and that the Chinese do it bigger than we do any holiday in America, I was looking forward to my first Chinese New Year experience, and what an experience it was… Read the rest of this entry
An experience no amount of House Hunters could prepare you for
Apartment hunting in Beijing? Your chariot awaits you
Way back in November, when I decided I was going to keep studying abroad in Beijing for an indefinite amount of time, I made a list of 3 major things I needed to get done in order to stay/survive here: get accepted into a Chinese Language Program for the Spring semester, find a place to live, and make some sort of income. I ended up adding “get a Bank of China bank account” to the list (different story for a different day), and I’m still working on the income thing, so you could say I’m about 83% of the way to a stable life. For the benefit of anyone studying abroad here in the future, or those looking to be amused, I figured I’d share my experience with #2 on the list – finding my first apartment abroad.
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My CET final oral exam on freedom of the internet
I made it a known fact in my post “China Decided To Give Me A Little Graduation Gift ” that I was almost positive I owned my final oral exam – a 10 minute oral presentation of an 800 character essay we had to write earlier the previous week. I assume most people haven’t seen an essay written in Chinese, either in characters or pinyin, and I thought it would be cool to post that essay on the blog – in characters, pinyin, and of course English. After considering the dangers of publishing a post on internet freedom in the middle of China, I decided it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. So here it is, how Al Gore and Communism helped me ace my study abroad final.
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My 2012 study abroad New Year’s resolutions
No one ever told me about the rager going down at the Temple of Heaven so credit to the AP for the photo
I have mixed feelings about New Year’s resolutions. For the most part, I feel like if you want to accomplish something, there’s no need to wait until a specific day to start doing it. That being said, New Years is still a great reminder of how quick time flies. If nothing else, it allows me to reflect on everything I said I wanted to do over the course of the previous year (and whether or not I actually did them), as well as push me to start planning what I want to do next. In the spirit of that mindset, here’s 5 things I accomplished this past year, and 5 things I’m looking forward to/ want to/ need to do in 2012.
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A very Merry Tibetan Christmas from my friends and family to yours
This is the first time in my life I haven’t been in the United States for Christmas and New Years. While I obviously miss all my friends and family back home, I don’t regret my decision to stay in Beijing at all. I’m slowly getting adjusted to “real world” life here, but I’m still searching for my own place to live and flying back and forth between opposite ends of the globe in the span of a week just wouldn’t have been the most logical choice. And while it’s definitely not America, Beijing has it own unique spin on Christmas to offer us foreigners and I genuinely had a lot of fun over the holiday weekend.
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I'm a 23 year old college grad, and during my junior year abroad in Scotland, I came to the realization that it's hard to know what you want to do in this world if you've never seen it. With that in mind, I decided to study abroad again during the 2011-12 academic year, this time in Beijing, China. Read more