Summer in Beijing (HBA)

So it's actually been almost two years since I updated this blog, but I decided that this would be a good idea to post something.  Looking at my past posts, I think that this is the only post about me that has ever been on this blog.

This summer, I went to China (on Yale's generous Light Fellowship, which payed for airfare, the Chinese language program, and a little more) to study two semesters worth of Chinese in two months at the Harvard-Beijing Academy (HBA) hosted at 北京语言大学 (Beijing Language and Culture University).

At first, I was a little nervous for this trip because it was my first time flying alone to China... actually it was my first time flying alone anywhere.  I've been to China before with my family, but I honestly did not remember any of the procedure and stuff I had to do to actually get to China -- all I remembered was the painful 13+ hour flight halfway across the globe.

However, studying abroad was probably the best summer experience I have ever had in my life.  It is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be able to go to a country so different from the USA, learn a language completely different from English, meet new American friends, meet new Chinese friends, and have a truly unforgettable time.

As I mentioned before, this experience was made possible through Yale's Light Fellowship, which had a small writing requirement: a blog about the trip or a written report at the end.  Many people chose the report because it is much less of a time commitment and is probably much easier to do.  However, I chose to blog because I thought it would be more fun (and it most definitely was!), and I'm very glad Yale had this requirement, otherwise I may not have documented "all" (actually, it's more like "some of") of the spectacular things that I did in China.  I admit to slacking off a little bit during the second half of the program, so my postings are like: a few in the beginning, a bunch on a free Saturday before our Social Study trip in the middle of the program, a few during/after the trip, and a ton of them after I got back to the USA.  You can just look at the dates of the posts to see that -- I didn't modify them to make it look like I was a regular blogger with a well-developed posting schedule.

If you weren't at HBA with me, some of the things may not make much sense to you, but I think you'd still enjoy having a look at my Adventures in Beijing!  I tried to make it more interesting than just detailing what I did every day, and I put up a ton of pictures because everybody knows that pictures are a lot more interesting to look at than walls of text (such as this post).  A few of the Yale students at this program also wrote blogs, so I tried to make mine a little... um... distinct from theirs!

So again, here's the link, in case you wanted to finish reading this post before clicking a link:
http://ericinchina2012.blogspot.com/