chocolate and chinese food

my first ever blog post. i'm kind of frightened.

i am not going to promise anything, or create high expectations. this blog may not be funny. it may not even be the slightest bit interesting. but everyone keeps bothering me to keep a blog while i am in china, and so i am succumbing. if i don't, my mom will force me to write her a "journal entry" twice a week so that she can keep it forever in the merriam files... this will have to do.

i am in canada right now, spending 3 days with the family before i head to china. i just got back from italy. my time there was full of eating, sweating, train-riding, photo-taking, music-listening and sight-seeing. it really was a wonderful time, and italy is a wonderful place, and my mom is a wonderful person for taking me there. we went to florence, naples, venice, verona, rome, pompei, and a couple of small towns in between. i have decided that venice is the most beautiful city in the world, although i have not seen the whole world, so that is a difficult claim to make. i have also decided that opera is a heavenly art form, despite earlier views otherwise. my third decision is that italian men are quite disrespectful, and a bit creepy-- although some of them are extremely attractive, despite their slightly metrosexual way of dressing. and fourthly, gelato is an invention of genius, and i shall never sicken of it.

i leave for china in 3 days, and am extremely excited. i will be at sichuan university, in the city of chengdu -- known as one of the "four furnaces" of china, for both its spicy food and sweltering heat. i love spicy food, and sweltering heat, so i think i will fit in quite nicely. i found out recently that facebook is blocked in china. perhaps that is a good thing, since many of you know i am a self-proclaimed facebook whore, and it will probably be good for me to not have the temptation. but i want everyone to still email me so that i will be in touch with the outside world! or at least comment on my blog. that is, assuming that i keep it up. which i should. although, admittedly, i am finding this first post quite stressful. so i will now finish. smooches to all.