The great travels are over

In the last 3 months I've been to 東京/Tōkyō, 広島/Hiroshima, 京都/Kyōto, 大阪/Ōsaka, 广州/Guangzhou, 深圳/Shenzhen, 香港/Hongkong, 澳门/Macau, 厦门/Xiamen, 泉州/Quanzhou, 福州/Fuzhou, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago, 昆明/Kunming, and half a dozen smaller cities and towns. All told I spent 7 weeks outside of 北京/Beijing, or about one half of that 3 months. Now I can get back to studying language, pre-reading for grad school, making a little money, and spending time with Ariel.

The trip to the States, financed mostly by UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, was ostensibly to check out the schools and see which one I wanted to go to. But I was already strongly leaning toward U of C beforehand, so it was really more about getting a chance to meet the people I'd be working with and being sure it was the right decision. A nearly free trip to the Bay area, which I'd never visited before, and a chance to see friends and family in Chicago were pretty sweet side benefits.

My time at U of C left me confident that it was the right choice and went a long way toward overcoming the disappointment of getting rejected by all the East Coast schools. In terms of overall program - faculty, students, and resources - U of C is probably better for me than Harvard, Columbia, or NYU. But I was really looking forward to trying life in a new city, preferably the same one my girlfriend was going to be living in. Nothing to be done tho. I guess I can't complain too much about living in a great city like Chicago, getting paid to learn about history.

Now that I have more free time I'll try to finally start writing about all the traveling and doing more political blogging.