The Inner Monologue of Ms Murray

Hello fellow bloggers, family, friends and UIUC web surfers!  It will comfort you all to know that all twelve of us have arrived safely here in Shanghai…and it only took a day and a half to do it.  Although I would prefer to never see O’Hare airport again, I must admit having to wait around dealing with delay after delay brought us all a little closer as a group…for some of us we have Lauren’s trivia game to thank for that.  Either way we are here and that’s all that matters.
After a late night turning in, all of us seemed fairly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for our 9AM breakfast roll call…speaking of which, our first meal was interesting to say the least, in fact this “Chinese Diet” may be the cause for the final loss of Liz’s freshman-fifty, but lets face it we aren’t here to eat…we are here to report.  Today we are heading off to meet some experts for our stories at 1PM and then returning to the hotel to meet some students who will help us translating and finding sources.  I am especially looking forward to this meet and greet with our very gracious volunteer students because I will finally get to meet Aisha, the Chinese student from Fudan (the university here in Shanghai) whom I have been in close contact with via email for the past few weeks.  Aisha is a masters student here studying Chinese Literature with the hopes to come to the states to study Journalism, she seems like a very intelligent, driven and enthusiastic person to be working with…I am lucky to have her by my side. 

Needless to say today is a building day and tomorrow is what I would like to call, “heres your good ole push into the deep end, now lets see if you can swim” kind of day.  More later…