Life in Botswana, so far

Where do I even begin...

Life here has been amazing, to say the least

Botswana!!!

So currently I am finishing up packing to head to the airport in a few hours. I fly 15 hours to Dubai, stay there for about 8 hours and get a flight to South Africa at 4:40 am local time, then a quick hop the Botswana!

I most likely wont have internet for the first month or so, but I promise to keep this updated once I get it.

Hope all is well! Wish me luck. Much love

oh and for those of you that do not know, I am doing a study abroad in Botswana, Ill be back by Christmas

My address:

Vincent
c/o Pitzer College in Botswana

Box 1482

Gaborone, Botswana

Back To School

So it has been a while since Thanksgiving in China. There has been so much going on in my life since then. The last month I spent in China was filled with traveling and adventure. I visited the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, seeing Tibetan areas as well as pandas. I also traveled to Shanghai and then to the Island in the south, Hainan, where I explored the rainforest and ended up surfing and camping on the beach. Followed by a few nights in bustling Hong Kong. Hopefully soon I can put all my emails up and photos, which give far more justice to my adventures.

Right now I am down in southern California and my school, Pitzer College. I have been here for about two months now studying and swimming. Classes are going fairly well, I am taking: The Writing Process, a class that is helping me develop my writing styles and a mandatory corse for a class I wish to take next year Writing for Non-Profits; Anarchist History and Thought, a pretty thought provoking politics corse; Intro to Socio-Cultural Anthropology, which is a very long name for Intro-Anthro and African History since the 18 hundreds, for my study abroad in Botswana next semester! What? You thought I was going to stay in this country for more than 7 months?

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

So I hope everyone had an awesome Thanksgiving. It was my first away from home and although nothing is better than spending the holiday with family, I still had a great time. I spent most of the day packing up my room and realizing how much stuff I brought to China and wondering how on earth did my parents manage to pack it all! For dinner that evening, everyone in our program headed to the Holiday Inn to get Thanksgiving buffet. We were accompanied by the Yale and Stanford programs (I made sure to remind them about the big game, GO BEARS!). Besides the dishes that you would expect at a usual Thanksgiving meal, like turkey, mash potatoes, gravy and cranberry sauce, they also had dumplings, shrimp and sushi. It was a pretty fun meal, definitely not as good as home cooked though.

 

Things are winding down here. Today I moved out of my dorm room and now for the next month will be living out of my backpack.

 

Oh and by the way, right now I am in Lijiang in Yunan provence.  I am actually sitting in probably one of the coolest hotels/houses ever. We are staying in an old part of the town. We had to walk down narrow cobblestone streets in order to get to this old converted house. There are lanterns everywhere and we can actually see the stars (something which really hasn’t been possible since Inner Mongolia). To get to my room I had to walk across a mini-pond. This place is amazing! We have been here only an hour and we already know that we want to come back!

 

Tomorrow we get to explore the city and maybe climb a mountain, then the next day we go to the Tibetan region, Zhongdian. I think it has the highest concentration of Tibetans outside of Tibet.

 

It is sooo amazing here and I hope I can keep you posted!

Visit, Finals, Travel, etc.

Hey, sorry for the absence. Life here has been super busy, yet amazing!

Cousin Francesca was here for about a week, listening to lectures and touring around the city.  I got an email last week saying that the next day she would be touring around my campus! I called her the next day and when she told me where she was, I said see you in 30 seconds and ran to hug her. Seeing a family member in a foreign county is pretty fun, especially when it’s not planned and it is the second continent on which it has happened. (A few summers ago, we both ended up in London at the same time). 3 continents down, 4 more to go. She was really busy, but I was able to show her some of the local spots. I took her and her friends out one night to our favorite local restaurant, Hole In the Wall (that’s not its name, we don’t know it, but it is just this tiny restaurant totally off the beaten path where the locals eat). We went to the silk market and ate dinner with my Iranian friends (see photo below). Then the night before she left, Francesca and I along with her friends got massages and cupped! Pictures of our adventures soon to come; she had the camera for most of our escapades.

Things are winding down in China. This week we have our Chinese final!!!! Time to study! The day after Thanksgiving we travel to Yunnan and Sichuan; we will visit Tibetan areas as well as a visit to the pandas!!!!!!! We are all super stoked.

I teach my English class tomorrow night, I am going to teach them about Obama and American universities and then we are going to play the game Taboo! The class is really cool.  I have shown the students pictures of my family and friends and they all think that everyone is “gorgeous” and “handsome”, obviously.

I miss you guys much, I hope all is well!

SNOW!

My Cousin Francesca is Here!!!

We just had dinner with some of my Iranian friends at a Persian restaurant; it was really awesome. Today Francesca and I went to the silk market and haggled for clothing!  Francesca is here with a group from American University.  She leaves Thursday to go to Shanghai.