It's a very strange feeling to travel 14.5 hours on a plane, get off on the other side of the world, and feel like the past year didn't happen. I guess I don't often return to a place with such close time proximity, but as Ola put it, we're feeling a little time warped. Aside from a desperate need for afternoon naps and humidity that has made my hair grow to three times its natural size, it kinda feels like we never left.

Since we arrived, we've done very little aside from eat of course. Much like last year, we had our one day with the Guilin girls before they left for the South this morning. Trying to coordinate 10 people seems to result in getting not much accomplished. We woke up early, ate some very tasty buns and lost two of our crew. Then we wandered around…somewhere. We ate a delicious lunch of noodles and dumplings then spent a million hours buying tea. Granted it's very good tea, but it was a very slow process. At that point we managed to lose two more folks. After reacquainting ourselves with the metro and determining that Nanjing West Rd. and Nanjing East Rd. are not in fact the same place, we finally ended up down at The Bund…with a million other people…where only half of the Pearl Tower was visible…due to fog???

So, this year we've decided to hook ourselves up with Chinese cell phones in order to keep connected with each other. Last year, our lack of communicative device meant that we actually had to be where we said we'd be, when we said we'd be there- feh, I say to planning!! That's a little more reliability and decisiveness than I think I'm comfortable with. Now we can keep tabs on each other and not have to come back to our rooms to chat with the front desk in broken Chinglish. This is a definite improvement.

We start school tomorrow. Hopefully we'll get a little busier and I'll actually have something interesting to say, but for now, I thought I'd just do a quick check-in to say ni hao!

Let's do the time warp again...