Ok, here’s the story, the introduction, the pretty much everything you need to know what’s going on in this little blog of mine, etc. I’ll probably leave out a lot of important stuff though, so if you have any questions, just shoot a little comment onto this post and I’ll get back to ya.

So here’s the short story.

I’m a rising junior at Yale, and am going to spend the next six months of my life in Beijing, PRC to learn Chinese and to learn what living in China is all about. From June 22 to August 18, I’m going to be at Beijing Normal University, being immersed in Mandarin with a program called Princeton in Beijing, and from August 27 to December 15, I’ll be studying abroad with the PKU-Yale Joint Undergraduate Program.

At the moment, I can’t say that I know much about what I’m getting myself into, but what I do know is that I won’t be speaking a word of English for the eight weeks following June 22. Despite the fact that I currently speak Mandarin at the level of a 1-year old, I think that over the next few months my ability to communicate will get much better. Hopefully by the time the program’s over, I’ll be able to audit a math course I really want to take at Beida in the Fall. Beida (北大), short for Beijing Daxue (北京大学), means Beijing University in English.

Ok, I need to cut this post short because I’m in Gainesville right now visiting some friends at the University of Florida, and I need to eat some lunch.