keeping with the spirit of timely blogging, i offer you a list of positive and negative impressions of that mysterious oriental country, China. i'm honestly forcing myself to come up with a list of positive impressions, so as to not appear utterly negative. i'm working on it...

the positives:

• best chinese food i've ever had
• unreasonably cheap beer
• unreasonably cheap everything, for that matter
• one Great Wall
• something other than european architecture
  
• trandem bicycles available for rent on the boardwalk
• Bubble tea
• stiff ping-pong competition
• 5€ full-body, 1.5 hour massage
• Korean barbecue
• traditional tea ceremony
  

the negatives:

• arteries caked with MSGs
• large-scale absence of fruits and vegetables in daily diet
• continual stares
• the radio amplified across the campus in weihai every morning at 6:30 am
• people spitting everywhere
• inter-city transportation
• inter-city transportation
• inter-city transportation
• traveling 100 miles in 5.5 hours
• being elbowed out of a "queue"
• not being able to communicate very well(admittedly my fault)
• ugly architecture, on the whole

and on a final positive note, the morale boost of the trip came when neal and i were in weihai and passed a group of young schoolchildren, 6 years old i'd say. as we walked by, i heard one boy ask, "zhong guo ren?", meaning "chinese people??" despite his friend's quick dismissal of us as foreigners, i was elated to be mistaken for a chinese person.

all in all, i'd recommend visiting China. just be prepared to be shocked by a culture so different from your own.