LGA

I'm sitting in LaGuardia Airport in New York, having arrived 3 hours early for my flight to Detroit where I will connect to Shanghai.  I figured, international flight, so get to the airport early, yeah?  Turns out, LGA doesn't really do international; I almost got through the entire check-in and security process without showing anybody my passport and Chinese visa.  So a quick word to the wise: flying internationally through LGA, even if it involves a layover, may be the way to go.

I figure I might take advantage of the extra time before my flight to start my first blog.  I never really fancied myself a blogger.  I love to write, and have always chided myself for not doing it more often.  But blogging always seemed like too much of a hassle.  I always felt that to begin a blog meant committing to posting as often as possible, even if there was nothing in particular to post about.  And, let's be honest, even if you assume that people are interested in reading what I have to say, is there really a way to write something that would cater to all of my friends and family?  Ultimately, I've arrived at the conclusion that none of that really matters, much.  The whole point of a blog is to make it whatever you want it to be, right?

And if there was ever an opportunity to give this blog thing a chance, it would be now: the beginning of my crazy, exciting, scary, educational, and potentially life-changing adventure to China.  And here we hit another snag: I am such a cliché.  Look at me!  I'm an overprivileged white guy, unsure of what I want to do with my life, unclear about where my place in the world is, on my way to China to "find myself," and I'm going to keep in touch with my friends and family by waxing poetic about my experience there, and how it will change my entire future.  That's not really what I'd like this thing to become, and I don't think anyone else does either.

So how about this?  I'll just write for me -- about living in China, the people I meet there and the places I get to see, about the language, my pursuit of fluency, and the absurdity of Chinglish, about dealing with what I expect to be a fair amount of homesickness and the natural process of learning to live on the other side of the world from all of my friends and family.  With a little luck, some of it will be of interest to some of you.  The only things I can promise: my sledgehammer wit, a plethora of run-on sentences, and a few choice kernels of this adventure onto which I am about to embark.  (And, I guess, as I look over that last promise, I can promise to never end a sentence with a preposition).

Just overheard a few teenagers sitting near me at my gate talking about speaking Chinese.  Maybe I'm not the only one here preparing to be a stranger in a strange land....