Pre-Voyage Orientation and first day in Beijing!

Before we left for China, we had a two-day orientation in Ann Arbor basically to get to know the other people on the trip and learn about some of the recent history and culture in China. We stayed in a hotel in Ann Arbor and the first morning/day we were able to talk to a couple of Chinese professors from UM and ask questions. We were also able to talk to some previous participants of the program, which was pretty cool. After that, we just walked around Ann Arbor and bought some gifts for the professors we will be doing research for this summer; I got a maize and blue t-shirt that says "Michigan" in Chinese characters...hopefully the translation is right! Over dinner, we watched a documentary about the protests and Tank Man in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and then discussed it.
The next day, we just hung out (there was a pool in the hotel which was nice!) and we also went to Briarwood mall for a while because we were across the street from it. During lunch and dinner, we watched two more documentaries about General Mao, who formed the People's Republic of China, and talked about whether or not he was "good" or "bad." He was responsible for forming the People's Republic of China and bringing China into the modern world, but he was responsible for more deaths than Hitler.
On the 28th, we packed in the morning and headed to the airport around noon. We started a timer as we left Ann Arbor and found that, traveling through Tokyo, Japan, it takes a little over 25 hours of travel to get to Beijing. And we didn't have individual TV's like the trip I had to Europe last summer! which was a bummer! We basically flew north over Saginaw, Michigan, over the UP, then over Canada, Alaska, and Russia before heading South to Japan. It was cloudy most of the time but we did see some cool mountains over Alaska (I think).

Because we lost a day in travel, our first day in Beijing was Monday, May 30. We got lunch in the campus area of Peking University. It was a family-style meal and there were some good things (delicious green beans, beef of some sort, deep fried bread dipped in sugar, and bamboo), and some not-so-good things (couple dishes of mushrooms, lotus (gross...and had a strange texture), and this egg-tofu-soup thing (which had quail eggs in it...).

In the afternoon, we took a trip to a the shopping area by our apartment to buy cell phones and some random things from the grocery store. Then we got dinner that was similar to lunch and we all basically went home to sleep!

Some things to note about China:
99.99% of the people here are Chinese. This might seem like a strange thing to note but people come up to us and just take our picture because we're not Chinese...we even had a woman hand us her baby to get a picture of us holding the baby!
Traffic is INSANE here...I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen any accidents.
People randomly burst out into song walking down the street...no one else seems to think it's strange.