Arrival in Beijing

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, I've been having some problems with the internet in China. Luckily, I wrote a lot of e-mails during this first week, so I'm posting pretty much what I felt at the time, although significantly after the fact. This is an excerpt from an e-mail I sent to my parents a few hours after arriving at the ACC campus:
I just got into Beijing a few hours ago. I managed to make my connection inVienna with plenty of time, they didn't even start boarding until about 20 minutes after I got there. After getting my bags, I walked through customs,changed some money and walked over to the taxi stand. My driver wasn't surewhere the school was, but I told him what streets to take and we ended upgetting there pretty easily. I went to the foreign students dorm and recieved my key from the guard, went up to my room, unpacked, then wandered out and met some of the people living on my floor. The language pact doesn't start untilthe 23rd, so everyone is taking advantage of this to get to know everyone else in English, before we have to start soudning less intelligent in our less than fluent Chinese. The people I met seem really nice, and I went with two of them to buy a cell phone card. We are going to buy cheap cell phones later,apparently it's a good idea to have a cell phone while you are here, even if it is just for calls in China. I'm pretty tired right now so I'm going to take a quick nap before an ACC sponsored tour at 5pm. Hopefully it will be a good chance tomeeteveryone who is here. I'm excited to start diving into Chinese, although I knowit's going to be hard. Tomorrow is the placement test, so I'll probably be done with it by noon. I hope to place into third year, since that is the expected level it would really stink to be held back in second year.