In about 17 hours I will be on the other side of the world. I spent the night in a nunnery in Chicago with others who are attending this program in Beijing. Everyone is excited and we are all getting to know each other. Most people go to one of the many Loyola Universities around the US. My new roommate Chris, is from Michigan and goes to Saint Louis University. He and I will be sharing a dorm room at the University in Beijing. We are in an international dorm which is supposed to be the nicest dorm on campus. The other dorms cram 6-8 Chinese students in one room.

I also met another guy who goes to Marquette named Ben. It kinda felt like an episode from the Twilight Zone when I met him, because my friend Ben from Watertown, looks just like this kid and also goes to Marquette. He is going to Denmark for the semester and has a really entertaining blog. Check it out here. After dinner, we watched "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon". I hope they teach me some of those moves in my Martial Arts class.

I am writing this the morning of my trip, because I woke up a few hours ahead of schedule and was too anxious to get back to sleep. From here I eat breakfast, hop on a bus to the airport and then sail off for about 14 hours to Beijing. I have installed Skype and my name on there is colingillingham. I am 13 hours ahead of central time, so we will have to schedule our phone calls accordingly.

Stay tuned, because the next few posts will be pretty interesting. Hopefully, I can take some cool action shots and get them on here for you all to see. Zaijian for now.