Leaving Changzhou

I've been thinking for weeks about how to sum up my time in Changzhou now that my time there is done and I haven't been able to come up with anything. The more I think about it the more sure I am that there is no one way to sum up my time in Changzhou. I meet so many interesting people, went to so many unbelievable places, and did so many things that I never though I'd do that there is no one explanation for it all. I was talking to someone the other day and I noted that I think that going to China may have been the single best decision I've ever made. I made so many great friends and have so many great memories that no one thing describes it all. I'm sad to be leaving Changzhou and all the great people there and I hope some of you can come visit me in Xinjiang. I'll try and continue to write in some form there, whether it be on this blog or on some other place I can't really tell since I don't know what the internet will be like there, but I'll try and keep everyone updated. One way or the other it's certainly been a blast and thanks so much for reading.

-Daniel Davis

My New Baby

You may have noticed a few more spelling errors recently, or not my spelling is so bad anyways who can keep track of the difference, well some of that is that I'm still getting used to the keyboard on my new laptop. I was sick of taking that gigantic xbox360 with me so I thought that since I always take a laptop anyways I might as well make it a gaming laptop. I've had my old laptop since before I went to Australia so it was time for an upgrade anyways. I looked a quite a few computers but settled on one from a Taiwanese company called Asus who have made motherboards for a long time but only recently gotten into making laptops. The price was really good it was about $500 dollars cheaper than a comparable on from Dell and so far I love it. One of my favorite features is that while my old laptop only had about 50 GB of hard drive space this new one has 1 Terra-byte or 1,000 GB of space. It's enormous of curse with a 17 inch screen and basically no battery life but all my games look stunning.

Visa Visa Visa

For a while now I've been thinking that I would have to push back my flight to China due to how long it was taking to get my visa. To go to China I need a Z-visa or a working visa, going there on a tourist visa doesn't work since you can't change it over. When I get to China I then need to take that Z-visa and use it to get a residency permit that functions as a more long term visa. I did this all the first time I went to China but since I'm switching places I have to go through the whole process again. In order to get my Z-visa I need to have a few documents from the school in China. They've been taking quite a while to get so I became worried that I'd have to change my flight. But just a day or two ago they finally got the documents in China and are mailing them to me in DC. It will still take a few days for them to arrive but when I get those getting the actual visa should be pretty quick. So it looks like I'm actually going to get there on time. If it just takes too long for some reason I'll just push my flight back about two weeks which should give enough extra time. This is just another example of how last minute everything is in China.

Buisness Class

Well as a lot of you know I'm back in the US, it can be hard to be motivated to write on the blog when I see so many of the people this blog is intended to inform. Getting back is always a long process but it was made a lot nicer this time by the fact that through a quirk of fate I ended up with a business class ticket for my flight. Usually a business class ticket costs more than a whole row of economy class tickets and since you don't exactly get there any faster I've never even considered it before, but through some special deal American Airlines was having I got the business class ticket for the same price as an economy ticket. It may not be any faster but it's like sitting on a whole new plane. The food was much better than the stuff they serve in economy which is still better than what they serve in economy on any domestic flight. There was a ton of space in front of me, so much in fact that there were actually two tray tables since one wouldn't reach out far enough from the seat in front. The seat itself was radically more comfortable than anything in coach. It was sort of like siting in a lazy-boy for the whole 14 hour flight. The seat could adjust in about15 different ways and I think I spent a good couple of hours just moving the different parts. Unfortunately I still didn't really sleep but it was still much much more pleasant than being in economy. Now the only problem is having to go back to the normal seats.