Well it's official, the blog at least.

My family seems to be quite interested in the fact that I could be going to China by November of next year for 10 months that some are starting to plan their expedition over and what they would like to do while over there. However, I'm not even over there yet.

I thought in the process of getting over there, as well as once I'm over there, many people would be curious about my endevors and excursions while over there, so I easily thought the best way to keep the masses informed: a blog.

At this point, I've sent in my visa application, I've done my health check up, and I currently have a university interested in me that I am trying to organize an interview for.

The university is in the Anhui province, which is west of Shanghi, and incorperates the Yellow River. Here is a link to their govermental website for the province: http://apps.ah.gov.cn/ . As far as the reading I have done on it (pretty minimal at this point) it does seem like a facinating place. It has a lot of ranges of flat praries and mountains. It is an older province that dates back to the Ming dynasty. Many of the larger cities are pretty well populated with an average of 6 million in most of them. The weather there seems to be a distinct four seasons, some areas are more wet than others, but four distictive seasons will suffice for me. There are also a lot of older Buddhist monistaries and bronze age communities, which my mother is currently salavating over. All in all it seems to be pretty interesting.

I'm trying to learn as much as I can about the culture as I can before I go, which will be difficult, but I would at least like to have a general idea. I've taken out some of my course work and text books from the philosophy of Buddhism course I took in college, as well as the eastern religions course, which has highlights on Confusiusim. I finally cracked and bought a book too, China from A to Z, which was actually a gift, but it was one I was considering to buy for reference anyway. I found a pretty in depth book at the Govans library branch, too, which I think may be worth buying too, titled Understanding China: A Guide to China's Economy, History and Political Culture. It had some really interesting figures and sets of data I was perusing this weekend. At this point, I really don't want to invest any money or time into looking at travel guides until I destinctly know what region I am going too and then I can focus my area of interest once we get there.

In the mean time, I breifly talked to Tony Jo, the director of forgein affairs at the university I could feesibly be teaching at. It's been a hit or miss conversation for two days now, since he's trying to call from a skype line. In which case, I think I may need to crack and set up a skype account. Last night, he did get my email, and we agreed we would email for now, so we'll see how that goes.

That's pretty much where I am at now for the progression of my trip. I shall keep you posted.