Classes :(

we had classes today :( but i have noticed alot of different things with my host family. For example i have noticed that while my host family has an A.C. a dishwasher a plasma screen TV fans and many other luxuries they are rarely used. It is as though they have them to well... have them so they can say i have A.C. but it is never used. it is very odd. They also have many very old books that are in a bookcase none of which are suppose to be taken out. although my host father did take out a book and allowed me to read it. it was very interesting it is about how to act in america and all about american customs and manners and how to act around americans. it is like a guide to americans for chinese people. very good read i am a little overwhelmed with the workload ,of the classes, though.

Yu Gardens, Pearl tower and Sun Yat-Sen's residence

Today we all gathered at the botttom floor of the compound at 8:00. we all met and walked to the front gate of East China Normal University together. We got there around 8:30 and waited under a bus stop place because it was raining so hard. at 845 we all went into the bus that had just arrived. after that we all went to the Pearl tower first and i enjoyed it alot i like the glass floor the most. then we went to the yu gardens and ate lunch after that we were allowed to shop at which time i purchased some small items for my family members, which i later found out i was ripped of for but i dont i feel it was worth it and i learned a lesson from it so i will not let is ruin my trip then we went to sun yat-sens residence he was the "george washington of China's history" then we went and ate dinner and watched an amazing acrobatics show.

Moving into Home stay

First of all i skipped a few days just because there is so much going on here. I get lots of work and i had a test yesterday.
Everything that was really important happened at 1:00 so i will start my day there. at 1:00 we had a meeting about our host families and what we should anticipate we were told all about how we need to respect Chinese culture and about when to give gifts and such, nobody was really listeneing though because we were all so excited for the host family activities. after that got over it was about 1:45 and we were told to go take a nap or something until 2:30 when we were going to be assigned to our home-stay families. this made it more difficult for them to do the presentation. so they went over a few minutes which made everybody even more anxious. after that we filed in and formed up a line and all the males were called out first which was made especially awkward by the fact that my last name is Santolucito and that was the last one due to the nature of an alphabetized list. after that i met my host father and we went to my room and gathered my bags and we took a cab to get to our compound. after that we went up ten floors to our area. when i went inside i had to put on these like slipper things that were a little wierd and i found out that all chinese homes have these and walk inside with shoes or socks is not acceptable and that if u are inside u wear these slipper things they were kind of like flip flops but slippers. so that was interesting. after i got all unpacked i gave my host family the gifts that i brought for them. they liked the inflatable globe that i could use to show them where i was from a lot. after that i did some of my homework which was to create sentences from some of the vocabulary that we had. after i worked on my homework for a little while at 5:30 we ate dinner which was very good they retaught me how to use chopsticks telling me that the way i was using was the american way of using chopsticks and that i needed to learn the real way of using chopsticks which was the Chinese way in which the placement of one finger is minutely different but that was fun to relearn something even if it did make me look like an idiot at the dinner table. i have noticed that the chinese host family i am with constantly has th television on. i have yet to see it off and on top of that they seem to like to take pictures, lots and lots of pictures. While i was eating dinner, granted that i was having great difficulty eating with this new and "improved" way of using chopsticks, the host family just kept getting me to eat more and more and more. i ate more than i ad ever ate before. i didnt even know i could eat so much. for example there was one dish which i knew was pretty common in china it is a a kind of soup that has tomatoes and eggs in it like scrambled eggs and fourths of tomatoes it was good but they put the serving bowl in front of me and i started to put it in my bowl but then they said no no no that bowl is for you and they had serving bowl sized dishes that they wanted me to eat all of, my mother brother and father all shared another set of serving bowl sized dishes and then id i was i was full they would get defensive and ask me what they did wrong in the cooking process and why i didnt like it and on and on about how i needed to "chi yi dian duo" eat a little more. i am so stuffed anyway after that i opened up skype and talked with my grandmother and mother and brother and ended up translating. and that was about all of my day i will try and keep writing

Pizza and illness

A post at last. I am writing this as if I wrote the day of. I am sorry I could not write too much about today but I was very sick and had irregular bowel movements. I do not know the cause of this illness but I have formed a hypothesis. The only logical explanation is that it was something that I drank because I never eat food outside of the program meals and weird junk food I brought from the states. I believe that it could be caused by the water that I drank at lunch today. There were many water bottles that were sitting on a table that were for us. I was thirsty so naturally I took one, I opened it and noticed it as unusually full. I dismissed this observation as the company accidentally putting more in this bottle. Later I realized the seal must have been broken. This most usually indicates that the water bottle was refilled using tap water or water that is cheaper than bottled water. many street vendors do this I was not too worried cause we were in a restaurant this I now know is not a safe assumption. Sorry again for the shortness of my replies I have also been swamped with homework and quizzes. But I am learning soo much I suppose I could study more but I really don’t feel that I should waste this wonderful opportunity studying all the time. I will work on writing more.

Dear Followers,
I wont be able to write too much but here it is. today i woke up late about 7:00 and went running I went to breakfast then went back to the dorm and ate some freeze-dried granola with blueberries and milk. it was good and a great way to start my day. I then went to the shanghai museum and then to the shanghai urban planning museum and finality to the Bund when we got back to the dorm Dmitri and i went and played ping pong i got back to the dorm studied a bit then fell asleep.
p.s. sorry it is so short i will try and write more tomorrow.

Dear Followers,
Today I woke up at about 6:30 and started studying for the quiz. I kept studying until about 7:30 then i went to breakfast and had... breakfast. After that i went back to my room and studied a bit more then i went to class and had the quiz. it went okay out of the 24 Qs on the test i think i got 2-3 wrong. Really a drag cause i studied so much. Then we went over a bunch of grammar patterns ffor speaking which was a bit depressing cause they were so easy but my humility in writing kept me intact after that we went and ate korean food for lunch again, i am really loving the variety. after that we went and had culture class. cuulture class was pretty fun we talked about modern china its size population political problems i.e. Uighurs and Tibetans and the somewhat larger problem of taiwan. We then talked about the five major river systems and the geography of china vs. America. Dr. Chen, our professor, told us about how we have a quiz on thursday. OH right i forgot to mention that we also have a quiz in my language class the same kind that i spent hours studying for then still made mistakes. so after culture class we all went to tutoring. Our tutor was busy so a grad student came and tutored us which was pretty cool. He helped me on my studying technique and i think it should be much easier now. after that we did this buddy worksheet but our buddies were not there so we ended up doing it with our tutors but it was fine because our tutor was a grad student so he was more knowledgeable about the campus however we still came in second place because the group in front of us didn't do a question so they were able to get back sooner. for dinner we had western food which was really wierd. there was imitation tomato soup and imitation pasta. to top it all off there was this salmon, if you wanna call it that, that had this congealed fat and lemon juice sauce on it. after that i went and watched some people play ping pong for half an hour and then a elderly man taught me some tricks. then i went back to the dorm made some freeze dried pasta and started writing.
p.s. i am going to work on adding pictures.

Dear Followers,
Sorry about the lateness of my post but after reading this i hope you will understand. day two in china was very busy and eventful i will do my best to include everything in this post. I didn't really sleep too well but that must have been the jetlaggggg. I woke up every hour or so and at about 4:30 i was so awake i decided to suit up and go for a run. The run went well i got to the track at 4:45 and there was a line to get in. Well first of all i have to explain that to get in you go through this like rotating door thing were it counts the number of people that go in. so it was 4:45 and i was waiting in line for almost 15 min to get in. once i actually got in I did a pace workout just to see how the air was effecting my running. it was a tad bit difficult to run when theres more than a hundred elderly couples fast walking around a track. ya it paints an odd picture but you would have to be there to really understand how ridiculous it is. so after running i went back to my room and im not really sure what i did till 8:00 but i guess i took a shower and did skyped some people. at 8:30 we went to breakfast, my absolute favorite meal of the day in china, tasty warm soy milk, rice buns filled with mushy spinach and leaks and then a bun with
egg yolk and bean curd on the inside, doesn't get better than that. so i ate and then went to the on site orientation where i met a bunch of important people who i dont remember, so they cant really be that important. then i went to my chinese class which consisted of all of three people which was very challenging but in a good way. it is really crazy, you know my brother went to interlochen where he was surrounded by people who shared his passion for music, i never really understood why he liked it until now. every single person on this trip loves china and learning chinese. anyway i have a quiz tommorrow we will see how that goes i was studying until 12:30 which technically isnt included in this post but ya, it was alot of writing i also learned about his new memorization program called Anki its pretty cool. after class we ate korean food for lunch and then had culture class. culture and history class was a little boring cause i have already taken it but i can always learn more. after that we went to our tutors mine is this girl named su so thats cool. Dmitri and Gianna are in my group Dmitri is from D.C. and Gianna is from L.A. then i went back to the door fell asleep slept through dinner woke up got something to eat then studied for endless hours. :D

Planes Ride

Dear Followers,
Today I left my home at 4:15 AM to reach my first destination of a very long trip. We drove to Bradley international airport. It was so early that there was barely any traffic and we got there in 30-45 min. Upon saying my goodbyes to my mom and brother i went into the airport to see a rather large line, yes, a line at the check-in counter at 5:15 AM, they had two people working at two separate registers. One worker had a man with a show dog who had an enormous kennel at at least the size of a standard refrigerator in the U.S., the dog was a purse sized dog as well. So this held up one line and the other line was held up by a couple with three children and four strollers. I mean really why do you need four strollers for three kids ??? anyway they needed to be checked and that held up the other line. I ended up waiting in line until about 5:50 at which point they decided to open up a third register, only took them 40 min to figure that out. I was able to quickly check my bags and put them through this x-ray thing which was kinda cool. Luckily they didn't choose my bag for a "random" inspection which consists of breaking/opening the lock on the bag if there is one and turning the bag upside down and then jamming all the passengers crap back in. So i got through check-in okay and i got through security without any problems. I got to my terminal and was starving it was about 6:30 and my flight was set for departure at 7:15 and boarding at 7:00. so I ran to the little store thing near my gate and bought some granola parfait, I've become quite fond of the stuff. After which i got on my plane and flew to Chicago. I was unaware of the time difference so I thought that we arrived at 9:40, it was actually 8:40. This had me worrying because my next flight started boarding at 10:00. our gate was taken in Chicago so i sat within 1000 ft of my next plane waiting until 9:10, keep in mind i thought it was 10:10. I kept calm and got off the plane sprinted to the next gate to find a bunch of kids from the group playing cards and completely relaxed. I was freaked out until they gave me quizzical looks and i looked at the Clock in the airport to see it was in fact 9:15. so i went to Starbucks and ate a piece of lemon lb cake, another granola parfait, a blueberry muffin and a raspberry danish. this all went well i got on the plane and ended up sitting next to a middle aged man who was on a trip from the university where he worked, Wright University in Ohio, he said that he was going to dalian in the northeast of china. That was nice i slept for most of the time though and watched a couple of movies. We got to Shanghai and had a 1 hr 30 min bus ride to get to East China Normal University. When we got there we had about 2 hrs of free time to get settled my roommate is Jammel Maddox as planned and he is very nice. after settling down i went to the ATM and got some money out. We went to dinner and had a lot of small dishes and i ate a lot and loved it.

P.S. I might not be able to write this much all the time but i will always have updates everyday

Washington

The last two days we spent in Washington at the PDO, pre departure orientation