Day 1, from Jack

On the morning of March 17, 30 of us set out on an adventure of a lifetime. 

We had been anticipating this for a while now, and we all arrived at school with a mixture of fears and excitement. The community room was filled with concerned parents feeling uneasy about letting their children go halfway across the world. 

We all said our final goodbyes and boarded the the passenger bus headed for JFK airport in New York.

The flight was set for departure at 4:50, and with a couple of hours to spare we walked around the terminal to find places to eat and drink.

With snacks in one hand and passports in the other, we took the first step on our journey to China.

The plane ride was smooth sailing, but as we all know, there is no such thing as a plane ride without the snoring lady to your left, or a man playing loud music on your right, or a screaming baby in the row ahead.

The ride seemed to take days, as we crammed into the double decker plane with our carry-ons. There, we watched movies like 'Creed' and 'Brooklyn', and played games like battleship and sudoku on the touch screen provided for the passengers. We were also given two meals with noodles, rice, fruit, yogurt, bread, and cookies which we gobbled up.

Once we finally got off of the 13 1/2 hour flight, we did what all others do when traveling to other countries, which was to go through customs, and exchange our American Dollars into yuan. We later ate at a noodle place in the airport. Many laughs were shared with our friends when all of the cooks started to take pictures of us. 

We ended our extremely long day with a 40 minute bus ride to the Jiangxi Grand Hotel. We got our room keys, and headed up to our assigned rooms. After 10 minutes of trying to figure out how to work the foreign elevator, and another 10 minutes of trying to figure out how to turn on the lights, my roommate and I quickly fell asleep. 

Day 1 was complete .