Part III: Australia!

G'day Mates! As most of you know, during my stay in Nanjing I also dipped down under for about 10 days and visited a few of my friends studying abroad in Brisbane, Australia. While I didn't have too much time to spend in Australia, it was a great trip none the less and helped me move one step (or should I say continent) closer to my life goal of visiting every continent! As of now, I only have Antarctica to go!

My first few days in Brisbane were a bit chaotic as we pretty much immediately shipped down to the beach town of Surfer's Paradise and moved into a hotel for 2 days. Surfer's Paradise was great, however, and we had an awesome time hanging out on the beach and enjoying the quaint atmosphere of the beach town. The only slight annoyance was the somewhat painstaking public transportation debacle that we went through to make it there. I must say though - I remember a local coffee shop down in Surfer's paradise that had a delicious coffee frappuccino called the "Voltage" which I have never had before - if you ever make it down there, I highly recommend trying one.

The next few days of my trip were spent enjoying the "Uni" (College) life in Australia and catching a glimpse of daily life in Brisbane. I found the Australian student's to be quite hospitable and quite rambunctious when it came to partying! I have never seen such a rowdy crowd before, and it seems like American concepts like "homework" and "attending class" have much less importance in an Australia education!
One of the main highlights of my trip was also a visit to the "Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary." The sanctuary featured numerous live "authentic" Australian animals that I could pet, feed, and take pictures with. Despite my, and my friends, best efforts - the best picture I was able to get with a Koala came out something like this one.

Fortunately, I was able to get some much better pictures with the Kangaroos at the sanctuary and they seemed to be a bit more inviting than the lazy Koalas. For some reason, the Kangaroos reminded me of dogs - they seemed lovable and friendly and they liked to be petted and fed! However, some of the bigger ones would growl if you seemed to be encroaching on their territory.

My last day in Brisbane was by far the most exciting. While the rest of my visit was certainly enjoyable, my friends and I decided to use my last day to go Skydiving! While I don't have the pictures from the dive itself back yet (I do have a video...) I will get them once I get back to the states.

However - I do have a few pictures that were taken by my friends on the ground that can give you a glimpse of my skydive. We dove from nearly 15,000 feet - the highest you can dive without an oxygen mask - and had over a 60 second free fall before our chutes deployed. Of course, I didn't dive alone - first time divers always have to go in tandem with a professional diving expert. I did, however, get to fly my parachute around for a bit once it had been deployed! The dive itself was exciting and not nearly as scary as I had anticipated. The scariest part was probably jumping out of the plane itself, but the entire experience was not even close to as terrifying as the Bungee jump I did last summer in Africa.
My skydiving adventure was a great conclusion to my visit to Australia and the next morning I hopped onto a plane to take me back to China. While my time in Australia was certainly one I will never forget, I must say that when I returned to China it truly felt like I was coming home.

Part II: Random Shots from Chinese Dorm Life

Since most of my blog updates will focus on the various trips that I have taken, I thought I would include a few funny pictures and anecdotes from my stay here.

Here is a picture of my Chinese roomate, his name is Ganghui and he is currently studying to apply to Chinese graduate school - I think he wants to be a lawyer or a judge in the Chinese judicial system - apparently he also doesn't like to have his picture taken. Living with Ganghui has been great so far, he speaks awesome English and he is always trying to help teach me new Chinese sayings and phrases - he also helps me with my homework sometimes - which is a real life saver.

All of the girls in our program also have Chinese roommates - the girls are a bit more shy than the male Chinese roommates, while the guys will often party with us and hang out with us, most of the girls are much more reserved and tend to keep to themselves. However, sometimes they do tend to get a little crazy - I'm still not sure what was going on in this picture.

Sometimes we get a little crazy in our dorm as well. Here is a pretty silly picture of me at our friend Ping Ping's apartment. Ping Ping is a 26 year old Chinese girl who is the assistant director of CIEE Nanjing, but she loves to spend most of her time hanging out and partying with us.

One of my favorite parts about living in China is the fact that many Chinese people don't really know what to expect from foreigners, or 老外 (lao wai). The end result of that is that we can usually get away with doing some pretty ridiculous stuff. The following picture was taken at Hunan Lu - one of Nanjing's most upscale dining and shopping districts. My friends and I had just finished a birthday dinner at an expensive Japanese restaurant and we decided some antics were in order. While something like this would certainly get you in big trouble back in the states, I merely caught a few strange glances from the nearby security guards and then went on my way. The next picture is one of my personal favorites. For those of you that don't know, drinking, for a variety of reasons, is often a very important to the Chinese business culture. As of now, I have been working for a little over 2 months at a private Chinese IT Consulting firm (AOKY Consulting), and I have slowly become more ingrained in the Chinese business culture. Each month, around the 15th, my company holds a dinner party for the entire staff (about 45 people) that often results in somewhat heavy drinking. The following picture was taken at one of our previous dinner parties, please note: the man waving his arms strangely in the middle/back of the picture is my supervisor! Not only was nearly everyone at the party fairly drunk, but I even engaged in several chugging contests with the companies CEO and various other key executive members! I must say, I do like the way they do business here.

The Moment You've All Been Waiting For....

Hey there folks! Since I've been a terrible blogger for the last four months or so, I figured that I would do a few independent update posts for all my loyal readers (or lack thereof), hopefully at least one or two of you still check this website every once and a while.

I now present you with Part I: Lian Yun Gang

During the first few weeks of my stay in Nanjing we set off on a weekend trip to the coastal (I hesitate to say beach) town of Lian Yun Gong. Our trip encompassed a three day tour of the town and its surrounding tourist attractions. We arrived late on a Thursday night and were sadly greeted by wind a rain. Looking for a somewhat nicer weekend at the "beach" I hoped that the next day would bring more beautiful weather. Wrong. I awoke to a morning of gloomy skies and rain.

Little did I know that our main "adventure" for the first day was to climb down a rather large mountain. (I would later learn that climbing down mountains is a rather frequent Chinese tourist pass time). After taking a treacherous and speedy bus ride to the peak of what I believe was called HuaGuo Mountain (the home of the fabled Monkey King) we reached the peak only to be greeted with pelting wind an rain.

As you can see in this picture to the right, the weather conditions were less than "optimal." At this point I thought to myself, surely we are going to take a bus back down, now that we've made it to the top and the weather is ridiculous. Wrong again. After a grueling 3+ hour hike through wind, rain, and what I would argue were several small rivers, we finally reached the bottom of the mountain and went to lunch.

We spent the afternoon on boat tour of Lian Yun Gang's (absurdly choppy) harbor and got a view of it's beautiful (mud) beaches. When given a bit of free time to rove the beaches for ourselves, a few friends and I decided to search a nearby set of shops in hopes of a place to play Mahjong, a famous and incredibly popular Chinese game - similar to Gin Rummy - that is played with domino-like tiles.

The second day of our visit to Lian Yun Gang wasn't quite as treacherous as our first, however. We visited a sprawling "valley," which I can only describe as a sort of Chinese-style water park. Given that there were no rides or anything like that, it was a series of beautiful waterfalls, pools, and rivers, that extended deep into a nearby mountain. There was actually a slide that took you from the top of the mountain down through the valley but it was closed on the day we visited. When walking around the valley it was nearly impossible to stay dry, as we constantly had to cross through large and small rivers, pools, and even waterfalls. Despite the fact that it was a bit stormy when we visited, I can imagine that visiting such a place on a warm sunny day would be quite fun.

After our visit to the valley, we hopped on our bus and got ready for the five hour ride back to Nanjing. Despite the various antics and the chaotic weather, our first weekend excursion as the official CIEE Nanjing, Class of Fall '07 was quite enjoyable.