Well, I'm less than two hours until it's time to leave for Wuhan airport, to begin my journey back to the United States. No posts lately but enough is going on, more or less the beginning of the end of the first year for me here. And since this exact moment finds me at the cusp of a journey home after a significant time away, it might be fun to look back at this and see where my thoughts were.

I've spent the past weeks establishing a routine of sorts to finish here on a good note. I wanted to make sure I was devoting time each day to preparing for work and study Chinese as well. I've also spent a significant amount of time with my foreign student friends, who I grew more and more familiar. I've "known" them more or less for the past few months, first meeting them in early April. The first of them, Chris, who's from New York, left at the beginning of the week, signaling the end of the school term but giving us more reason to go out in grand style. So many a Qingdao beer was drunk, many a dance floor was danced on, many a laugh, and certainly a bit less sleep. Activities included lunch and dinner at different restaurants, movie night at my place (comparitively bigger living place with air conditioner) and heading across to Hankou for a night at the clubs.

They provided me a good balance here at the end, and for that I'm grateful. We went out in Wuchang last night in my honor, first eating at my favorite Korean restaurant and drinking lots of Korean soju and then heading to Vox night club to watch a skateboard competition and then dance our asses off. They even had a little card for me and signed it. And in less than two hours, a group of them will see me off. It seems funny I feel "aw shucks" about it but I'm a bit surprised. I mean, I felt like sort of the castoff, the one that's not a student but a teacher, who pops in and out of the activities. But that didn't seem to manner, and they accepted me unconditionally. That, I think, is pretty cool. It doesn't matter where you come from, how old you are...as long as you're a nice person, you're in.

My neighbor Anya, Martina (from Austria) and myself decided that a nice swim in East Lake would be the perfect send-off for me. We asked a bunch of others but they said mostly the same thing: "You're going in there! I heard it's so dirty!" Anya was even a bit skeptical but she came through. And it was a nice night for a swim...the moon was out, some stars (not always common to see here) and the water was a nice temperature.

Goodbyes haven't been too hard, and in fact I think all the goodbyes I've done, since going far from home to attend college in Arizona, become less and less emotional and even rigid. I also have a nice routine of what to say. On the other hand there's still a bunch of people I haven't talked to before I leave, but I feel like a 6 week trip away from this place isn't grounds for a formal goodbye. Sure, it's the end of a school year, but I'll be back here soon enough to resume my Wuhan life. Even so, the group of students that I know the best, from the past two summer programs and my Chinese tutor Rose, stopped by to hang out and take some pictures together. Always fun.

It was a little tricky to say goodbye to my neighbor Anya, who I've become good friends with. I've learned a bit about Russia in the process and had someone close by with a good sense of humor and always wanted to go out and enjoy the area, even when English isn't her native language. Since hugging is not something that all cultures do, like Americans, I had to ask so I didn't offend. She gave me a nice big one.

I've said this to a couple people but the only thing I see when I close my eyes is an airplane cabin. I'm feeling a little uneasy about the long flight for some reason. But staying up and having a sleeping pill at my disposal should hopefully take care of that. Gonna be a long couple days but a necessary evil to return to my native country and see my family and friends.

Not too wistful at the moment...can't believe it's come, that I've been gone for almost one year exactly. The first semester went a bit slow, and by the time I went to Thailand and other places, along with my parents coming, the days more or less melted off the calendar. Bob congratulated me on Gmail a bit ago about "making it"for the year and I felt a bit of accomplishment. But really, hard to look at it when I'm still here. I'm actually pretty comfortable here, and looking around things just seem like they belong that way. Sure, things happen every day around here and I think, shit, I'm in China, but I'd expect that with my American brain that was programmed for 26 years before I lived here.

I am ready to go home though, and am banking on a happy, eventful trip home. I don't want to build it up too much so I'm not disappointed, but it has potential to be quite an event.

I guess the one thing that I realize, and which I have a lot lately, and made a point of actually saying it, is my life is pretty great, especially my life right now while I'm living in China. The new experience, the people, the travel, are all beyond anything I could have imagined. Hopefully the momentum keeps going that way. Now I get to go home, on a 6 week vacation, paid for, and enjoy the American Life. I guess this is a good point to end the entry. Really, I have no idea if my eyes will see things a bit differently when I walk the streets of New York for a couple days with my hometown friends. Hopefully that will be something worth documenting and reflecting about. I keep thinking in my mind that I am like an American immigrant, coming into the country with fresh eyes. I'm even listening to Simon & Garfunkel...I've come to look for America.

Experience in China #842: The Internet

Well, in hopes to preserve a way to record life here, via a blog, it looks like I'll have to move from one part of cyberspace to the other. Last week or so a company in China, with the help of the Myspace parent company, Newscorp (I think), officially launched a Myspace China version. Well, since that time I have been unable to access my American myspace account, where I left 50 or so posts from the past 8 months here:

www.myspace.com/ericjmcgraw

It's interesting dealing with the Internet censorship in China; at first I was a bit amused, and now I'm a bit annoyed. Things load slow and sometimes things simply don't load. I can't access BBC news, or Wikipedia, amongst other things. And now, it looks like I'm locked out from American Myspace. Now, there could simply be a problem with loading the page, but I'm guessing that the China version of myspace, after reading a bit on the site, that they will control what is filtered and thus allows them to leave the American version behind.

And who knows what will happen next. I was told that you can use blogger to do a blog in China but you can't view it. I guess we'll see how that works. As one can see, there are some aches and pains, from an American perspective, about living in a country that has comparitively more control over their inhabitants' lives, and in this case the dangerous, full-of-bad-ideas Information Superhighway.