Tomorrow we are leaving for the mainland. 12 hour bus ride through the night, here we come. Dr. Jay was telling us what to expect today in class. It all sounds rather similar to the plethora of bus rides I had while on MESP, complete with the unloading of luggage on one side of the border only to load it all back up again on the other. Old hat. The only difference is that we are taking a public bus. So I could potentially be sharing my row with a legit Chinese person. It'll be interesting.

Today in class we discussed sentence formatting. Structurally, Chinese is very simple. There are no conjugations, no plurals. It's what you call a high context language--based on the whole phrase you figure out whether a word is supposed to be singular or plural, past or present. So basically I just have to get down the characters and the tones and I am golden. Haha, that'll never happen.

I did laundry yesterday and used a dryer for the last time till I get home. Bummer. It'll be like MESP all over again. The only difference is that in Xiamen it can take up to 3 days for your clothes to dry because of the humidity as opposed to the 3 hours it took in Egypt.