To China or Bust

Yeah, it's official, I'm leaving for China in two days. I'm pretty excited. I'm also pretty busy. I'll take lots of pictures, and eat lots of Chinese food, and tell everyone about it when I get back. If you want to email me, gardnerchina@yahoo.com is the way to contact me while I'm there. I'm not using my regular email and I won't be on myspace, and I won't post here, but I'll be checking that one fairly regularly. Talk to you all again when I'm back!

Chipotle, one of my favorite spots for lunch when I have time to go off-post with some friends. Amazing burritos, but the chips aren't the best.
This is me and Gilmore (one of my coolest classmates) at immersion. We all spent about 32 hours straight speaking and hearing nothing but Chinese. Fun, if you're into that sort of thing.
Of course, what's a good Chinese immersion without a little ping-pong? I dunno either, but it was fun hitting my teacher (Zhou, left) with the ball a couple of times. Just kidding.

So I have 1 good news and 2 bad news. I took a test the day before immersion last week, and I got the results today. Good news, 98 on reading. Bad news, 75 on listening. That's only two points from failing. Looks like I'm in for a lot of listening practice during the next week and a half before the next big test that will decide whether I go to China or not. Speaking of which, they changed the dates from Sept15-Oct13 to Oct5-Nov3. The 1st of October is "National Day," one of China's biggest holidays. I think that has something to do with it, but I don't know for sure. Bad news # 2, I got a flat tire on Monday. Yep. 300+ miles last weekend, and it decides to go "pop" less than a mile from post. I don't think I did anything to provoke it either, but you know how temperamental those things can be. Anyway, it doesn't hold air anymore, and it can't be fixed (according to the people I took it to), so I dropped it off at a well-reputed tire place and they should call me in the morning. I told them it was kind of urgent, as I need to drive a distance on Saturday to pick up Jeff. He didn't seem to speak English very well

Here are a couple of pictures from the past week or two, I've been too busy to send people pictures like I promised them, but I'll get to it soon, hopefully in time to send them along with Jeff. By the way, this is my first post, so welcome and enjoy. I won't be posting every day, so don't bother checking it every day.



















































He has such blue eyes!