Hi friends

Apologies for the silence. My computer is connected but for some reason refuses to let me log onto the network to actually use the internet. Hopefully this will be fixed tomorrow. I have been blogging, or I guess in layman's terms.. "journaling" .. offline so will have a lot to post once the Mac is up and running. My roommate's computer will have to do for the time being.

For now, a quick note: The language pledge has proven to be an incredible challenge - certainly one that I was anticipating but perhaps not emotionally prepared for. I'm naturally a very expressive person, and not being able to do so in Chinese has been frustrating, for obvious reasons. This morning the frustration sort of got the better of me and I felt very close to tears for a good portion of the day, blaming the emotion on homesickness. But I'm slowly feeling better, and am fei chang gan xie (very grateful - one of the trillion words I need to have memorized for our first day of class tomorrow) for my roommate's patience.

So much love to you all. Expect to hear from me much more frequently.