Leaving for China

When I left Australia at the end of second year, I was not sure where I would live for the following year. There were a number of options and I had a number of opinions on what I would like but there was truly no concrete preference of what should actually happen. Basically, the options available to me were as follows:

1. Go on exchange to China for the whole of 2006
2. Go on exchange for one semester and then return to Australia or decide to stay on for another one in China
3. Go on exchange to South America
4. Go back to Australia for the first semester and then go to China in the second
5. Just go back to Australia.

The options go on...

After being in Gainesville Fl for a few weeks I started emailing Simon Curlis and other involved people in Australia and things were still equally as vague. Things continued this way until communication stopped all together, which I later found out was due to Simon having been involved in a motorcycle accident. It was quite serious so I started interacting more with Soumitri Varadarajan, the RMIT Industrial Design Course director at the time.

Eventually I found out some details about the people in China that I would need to contact and got together with a Chinese speaking colleague of my father's to communicate with them. We tried to call them but, unfortunately, it was Spring Festival (the major Chinese holiday of the year) so no one was at the school. Ying Fantian, the course director at ZJU, who we tracked down to Australia, was able to be contacted and he suggested I just come to China and we would sort things out later.

In the last week before I would have to leave America to go to either RMIT or ZJU I started to worry a little. No tickets had be bought and I did not have a visa for China, nor did I have the required medical documents and so forth. I decided it would be worthwhile to try to go to China so I bought the cheapest ticket I could find, a week before my departure date. As a backup I also bought a ticket to Australia for the same day so if I could not get the visa in time I could at least get to RMIT on time for the start of term. I sent off my passport 4 days before my flights to try to get a fast visa. In the meantime, I worked to find some sort of lodging in China and fix other requirements of the trip. I sorted out the medical stuff but accommodation was still uncertain. My visa returned and I decided that I would go to China. I packed some things and that was that. I made a lot of phone calls that week.