Day 1

I arrived safely in Beijing yesterday evening, and was met at the airport as planned by my good friend Logan.  We proceeded to take the airport subway connection to the Beijing Metro, then rode the subway itself back to his apartment near Beijing Normal University.  The first thing I noticed when I got off the plane was the humidity and the unique smell that always accompanies it; it reminded me a lot of getting off the plane in India.  Logan said that yesterday wasn't even particularly humid, even though it felt like an incredibly warm 77 degrees to me. The metro was fast, clean, fantastically cheap (~2 yuan, which translates into $0.33), and not nearly as crowded as I was expecting it to be.  There's TV screens all over the stations and the trains, with CCTV constantly playing some combination of news, cartoons, and other miscellaneous programming. 
After dropping off my luggage at his apartment, we took a taxi to the 鬼街 (Ghost Street) area, full of bustling restaurants overflowing into the streets, cars parked all over the sidewalks, paper lanterns hanging from the trees, and restaurant vendors heckling pedestrians.  We ate at a fantastic Uyghur restaurant; Uyghurs, for those of you who don't know, are one of China's officially recognized ethnic minority and come from the 新疆 (Xinjiang) province in the northwestern most part of China.  We ate a bunch of different preparations of mutton, from mutton kebabs to mutton fried rice to stir fried nan and mutton.  It was all glorious.  There was also a delicious spicy fried green beans dish that had the most peculiar tingling and mouth-numbing aftereffects, due to its preparation with Sichuan Pepper. We washed down our massive meal with a few Yanjing Fresh Beers, one of China's big two mass market beers that was surprisingly good.  Afterwards, we walked around beautiful old Beijing for an hour or so, and I got a nice mini-tour from my history-buff friend. 
I'm currently stuck in my friend's apartment for another hour or so.  I can't move into my program until noon, and though I would love to go exploring I can't leave the apartment without my massive suitcase because I have no way of getting back into his place.  I'm planning on just leaving here and heading straight to Capital Normal University, where my program through Middlebury is located, and checking in early. 
The city is intimidatingly large and the language continues to scare me, especially knowing that starting Monday, I'll be basically speaking it exclusively.  As I walk around though, I'm constantly thinking about how to say certain things in Chinese, looking and reading posted signs and billboards, and just trying to get a grasp of the language's day to day use.  It's somewhat comforting that I can pick out words and phrases all around me, and it'll only get better with every passing day that I spend here.  I'm really looking forward to getting to know this city, and the Chinese language, really well over the next 4-ish months!
That's all for now, I'll check back in a few days.