Bits of an email to Alex

...
(Talking about college)
But I should be there now, and I'm not. I spent all of senior year around people who were getting psyched to go and forgot a lot of the time that I wasn't myself, so it is odd that everyone else is there now and I'm not. College...big and scary and far away. I still feel like a little girl. Except not, I feel like in some ways I'm older and more mature than the wild partying kids at college. It sounds like a lot of fun, but I've realized the difference between the comfort of moving somewhere new verses traveling in a new country. Let me tell you - China isn't comfortable. You don't always know what you are doing day to day, and it changes drastically. The routines you fall into can hardly be called routines, more like general guidelines of how to deal with what gets thrown your way. You get into a routine about how to shower in a bucket, how to find a bucket of hot water in a new village, what time to wake up and what sort of things to bring with you on day hikes/excursions, what types of things to talk about with new people (in Chinese), what food looks good and what doesn't (those standards change a lot), how to get bus tickets at the local station, and of course: charades. You learn a lot of charades when you are in a country that not only speaks a different language from you, but speaks SEVERAL different languages from you. Studying Mandarin is all well and fine until you stumble into a Tibetan village or a province that speaks only Cantonese. Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to college. But I'm worried, how will I stay in one place for such a long time? Will I get bored of living in the same place with the same people and with never having difficulty expressing simple sentence structures? It adds a lot of excitement to your life.