So I begin my journey!

Wow! So after months of planning, this is it! I’m finally heading off to Nanjing 🙂 If someone told me a year ago that I would be going to China to learn mandarin for 4 months, I probably wouldn’t have believed them. For starters, I wasn’t even learning mandarin at the time, and all I was focusing on was passing my intern exams. Secondly, I never thought an opportunity like this even existed. But somehow here I am, bags packed, ready to fly off 🙂 That escalated quickly!

So here’s the reasons why I’m writing this blog:
– Keep in touch with friends and family
– Excuse to use my GoPro
– Good use of my extensive free time
– Act as my travel journal so I can one day conveniently look back at my time in Asia
– Excuse to use my GoPro
This first post is going to be very choppy and rough, but hopefully along the way my blog writing skills will improve 🙂

Let’s face it, this year hasn’t been the best for air travel. So here’s hoping for a safe and sound flight. I’m flying China Eastern, which I’ve heard mixed reviews about. The good thing about China Eastern is that they allow you to take 2 x 23kg luggages, which is pretty generous of them. However, as I had more clothes than I thought, I packed and re-packed my luggage more times than I could count. After reducing the load of clothes every time I re-packed, only after the umpteenth time I decided ‘Hey I’ll get the scales out and weigh it now’. A measly 16.5kg ==” If I was smart enough to weigh it the first time, I probably would’ve been under the 23kg anyways and saved heaps of time!! Oh well, more space to buy more things then 🙂
Bad thing about China Eastern? Apparently no inflight entertainment and bad plane food. I’ll just have to read or take a sleeping tablet, and plane food is usually bad anyways, so as long as I don’t get food poisoning, I’m pretty happy.

Things I’ll look forward to:
– Free time
– No work
– Exploring China
– Late night eating out
– Learning a new language
– Doing what I want

Thing’s I’m not looking forward to:
– Polluted air
– Gastro (it’ll be inevitable, sigh…)
– Crazy, loud, spitting asians
– Sharing a bathroom and toilet (eugh)
– (Maybe) Slow internet

Although this whole experience could be quite daunting, for once I’m pretty optimistic about everything 🙂 Sure there could be a lot of things I could worry about, but I reckon there’s so much more to gain!
So 再见 guys! See you next year! 🙂 I’ll write in this blog everyday! 2 months later, 1 post written