cry me a river

edit: your chinglish word of the day is: succeedism. in america, this is best termed 'success'. from the infinitive 'to succeed'.

alright folks, i'm going to try to do this without failing. so if you read this, i have not failed.

i am in china now. this is how i got there:

• leave st. louis for detroit at 9:45 am (1 hour flight)
• 4 hour layover
• detroit to tokyo (12 hour flight)
• 15 minute walkthrough of tokyo airport to next flight
• tokyo to shanghai (3.5 hour flight)
• arrive 8:45 pm. find naomi (breathe huge sigh of relief), 30 minute bus ride to shanghai hotel
• spend the night
• shanghai for jiangsing (3.5 hour train ride)

china is very interesting. what can i say. i only saw one other non-asian person the whole time we were in shanghai and that was at mcdonalds. (naomi and seth said they saw three, however) granted, we weren't there very long, but with the shear number of people around you'd think we'd see at least a couple more. i'm not even talking americans here, i'm just talking non-chinese. it's really interesting the way the chinese culture meshes with the american. so many t-shirts sport english phrases etc. while we eating dinner tonight in a little eating joint (highly unsanitary by US standards, but if i don't get sick, i don't particularily care one bit because the food was great) anyhow, we're sitting there eating and suddenly i hear justin timberlake singing to me in english. how can one not feel at home when one has the catchy melodies of "cry me a river" or "rock your body" drifting into ones ear. on the train i also heard the tune of simon and garfunkel's 'el condor pasa' carefully worked into an asian melody. i thought at first that s&g had ripped off of chinese music because the style of music in theirs was very similar, but naomi informed me that it was probably quite the opposite since that's a fairly common thing in chinese music.

thursday and friday we're supposed to guest lecture for naomi's classes. i'm not sure what we're supposed to talk about, but we are fluent in english, so i'm sure we're pretty qualified.

i think i'm going to stop now, because i'm pretty tired. it's midnight here. i'm actually pretty on-track for sleeping here. i think jet lag is a myth if you're a college student. it's just like pulling an almost all-nighter. stay up for a long time. get a couple hours of sleep. stay up some more. arrive. sleep from exhaustion. i suppose this only works if you arrive at your destination at approximately sleeping time, though.

goodnight all.