Arriving in China

So as this post shows, I have arrived in China. Yesterday was very very long and by the end of the day i felt super lightheaded and wanted to sleep immediately. however we had to go eat at a buffet/restaurant with Li Shumin (the director) and a bunch of her colleagues. Before we did arrived though I had to go through a 14 hour flight with no plug ins for my computer, and then arrive at the airport. from the airport Ashley and I got our visas checked and made our way to "long distance bus" which would take us to Hangzhou. when we arrived, we thought that all the others would be way ahead of us as we had taken longer to fill out a sheet that the plane had ran out of (some medical form the others already had).
so when we got to the bus stop i was surprised to see that ashley and I were the first there. we waited quite some time before we decided to go back up the elevator to try to find them. then after waiting even longer we finally saw them at the end of a long hallway and we finally met up to get on the bus. the bus ride itself cost 100yuan which isnt very much (think 6.5 yuan to 1$ american), and we thought the bus ride was about 2 hours long. well 3 hours, a hurt neck, and even more tired/cramped legs later we arrived in Hangzhou. once we realized that we were not dropped off in the correct place, we had to take a taxi (HA, because we all speak chinese so fluently) to the actual Zhe Jiang campus. the taxi ride was super short and did not cost very much at all.
At this point we quickly registered to the international university (once we found it 30 minutes later) and then left for our buffet dinner. The dinner was very good, though most of us were tired and grumpy and did not eat much/enjoy what we had very much. though looking back to yesterday, i wish we had not been so tired and grumpy as the food was very good. after this we headed back to our rooms, unpacked and got situated with everything and then went to bed on a super hard piece of bed and what felt like a 20 degree room.
End of day, February 20th, 2010