Welcome to the China Blog

Ni Hao!

Thank you for visiting my blog of my trip to China! Here you will find updates of where I am and what I am doing while we are here. Although I would have preferred to simply send out a few e-mails with pictures and such, I am afraid that the wonderful Communist Party of China has restricted the uploading of files/pictures in e-mails (namely g-mail). I have heard that they allow such uploadage with blogs so that is why we are here. If this is the only blog post on this blog, know that that this site too has been flagged. Let's hope not...

Quick Breakdown:

I will be working with 9 other graduate students of the Planning and Architecture programs at UT. The purpose of the trip is to study international transportation. It is my understanding that we are going to be working mainly on the transit corridor between Guangzhou and Wuhan (two very large cities in southern China), learning about how the Chinese have designed and built their booming cities. Thankfully I am extremely pumped about the crew we have going and good (safe, Mom) times will be sure to follow.

My trip here can be easily broken down into three stages. They are as follows...

Stage 1: Hong Kong - An unstructured survey of the great city of Hong Kong. We will be staying in hostels and hotels for about 5 nights visiting the city, buying gadgets, and eating strange foods.

Stage 2: The Transportation Workshop, 10 days. We are partnered with the Southern Chinese University of Technology and the Wuhan University of Technology to do work. We will split time between Guangzhou and Wuhan. It will be really fun to work with Chinese students in the same field as us.

Stage 3: Shanghai - Once our workshop is complete, many members the group will head to Shanghai. We are mainly interested in the World Expo, French Concession and the 3x as many skyscrapers as NYC...

I am really looking forward to the trip and and thankful that I am able to share this amazing opportunity with you all. Feel free to comment on my postings, email me (ptconnor@gmail.com) or skype me. If I don't post for a while, please don't worry about me as I am obviously having an awesome time.

I head out Monday morning at 7am and arrive in Hong Kong Tuesday at 7pm (23hrs of travel and 13 hour time differential). Bon voyage and please check back here in a couple days for updates. FYI: I will be back in the states Aug 7.

Zài Jiàn!
Patrick