Hi everyone!! I've finally arrived in Manila after 20 hours in the air! Its so beautiful here. The people are so welcoming. I can't walk down my street without everyone smiling and saying hi. I will try to give more photos of my neighborhood and stuff soon but its seen as rude to take tons of pictures at once so I have to be discreet! We had a talk today by two Filipinos who live in our neighborhood. They sort of gave us the do's and don't's of the culture.  One thing that was really interesting that they told us was that Filipinos are always smiling. He said through all of the natural disasters and poverty in this country the people are amazingly resilient. They do not feel that they have time to be depressed. Everything that happens to them they attribute to God. He has burdened them with misfortunes because they can bear it, they can bounce back from it.  I thought it was a really interesting insight into the culture and I hope some of it rubs off on me! I'm so excited to learn from everyone here.  It's such a different place from home yet there are signs of America everywhere. There were Harvard t-shirts in a shop in the mall, they have payless shoe stores, and nba Suns jerseys for 5 dollars! Here's some pictures so far from my flight and first day.

This is my flight path!! I was about 6 hours in at the time out of 14....

I took this out of my plane window as we were flying over Russia.

This was the view flying into Tokyo.

One of the buildings at our school where we'll be having our classes, everything is so open, its like living outside , the weather is hot but beautiful.

This is the larger street that our house is off of!

My bedroom! I'm on the top. I'm in a room with four other girls in a house of  4 girls and 3 boys.