Where has Edna been, and where is Edna going?

That's right, I graduated. The last month has been a weird mix of goodbyes and emotions and silly things like that as I left Etown (and soon, home) for good. I also hosted two visiting friends from Australia, who I'd met in Dalian and had come all the way to Central Pennsylvania to see me graduate/turn 21. First lesson of adulthood: hosting people is exhausting.

Oh, and I turned 21! On the same day as graduation, no less. I have to give a shout-out here, for my family threw me an absolutely incredible graduation/birthday party.

So anyway, the eternal graduation question: What now? Well it certainly isn't more education- after the nightmare that was my thesis, I have no soul left and you couldn't pay me enough to go to grad school.

So where am I going? Back to China is the logical (and correct) answer, but surprisingly, I won't be staying long.

I mean, I'm 21 and I've already spent a year and half of the last four in China, not to mention all the summers I went to Shanghai. If I go back now, I can see myself easily falling back into the China Bubble, oh that dreaded Bubble, and I want to go out and really challenge myself this time. I mean, there's so much of the world to see! So I'm realizing my wish to move abroad again and starting a slow-travel RTW (round the world) trip, beginning with San Francisco in two days. I'll spend a week there, then head back to Shanghai for about five weeks of pure family/friends time, then I'm ....moving to Singapore!

That's all I've got planned so far, I haven't even a job lined up yet- just a three-week volunteer gig with the Youth Olympic Games that will take me to the end of August. I'm tentatively thinking Australia or the Philippines by Christmas, but I mean with these things... who knows? The last thing I want to do is plan too far ahead.

And if I ever need a backup plan...Shanghai's not going anywhere.

Photo of the Day: Read All About It

Taken at Dawai, the school I went to first semester to study Chinese. This was mid-March, around the time of the riots in Tibet if I remember correctly. We decided to all buy China Dailys (the English language newspaper) and see what they had to say on the matter. Blatant government censorship was an interesting new phenomenon for us, coming from America and Australia.

Midterms

Midterms are this week. Or, as F from Australia calls it, Mid-sems. The weather was beautiful all weekend, and then the Sunday it suddenly turned overcast, and has been raining/drizzling since Sunday night. The weather certainly matches everyone's moods; most students are walking around with a kill-me-now look on their face. Both my teachers this morning made mention of the fact that we were all there physically, but none us actually seemed there. [In my head I couldn't help thinking, "Someone's got a case of the Mondaaays!" ...but I would strangle someone if they tried to say that to me.]

I mean midterms are never fun but midterms in another language? And it's a language like Chinese, at that, where you could know the definition of a word but not the character, the character but not the defintion, or the character and definition yet still have no idea how to write it. I'm so glad I quit my job last week; there was no way I'd have any time to study with the commute being what it was.

I was pretty stressed all weekend due to a combination of factors, so I'm exhausted physically and mentally, but my roommate makes me feel even worse: I'm pretty sure in the last four days, she has spent 70 some hours studying. When's she's not sleeping or eating, she is in our room studying. I woke up at 2:30 this morning to find her STILL at it and made her go to bed because I know that she wakes up at 6:30 every morning. I have also never seen her smoke more than a cigarette a week before this weekend, now I believe she's onto her fourth one today.

I just want to get them over with; once I take the last one on Wednesday I am definitely going to just chill out for the four days we have until we leave for our big May Holiday trip Sunday morning.