Second Half of the Beijing Trip

After the class mates left Ashley and I stayed in Beijing for a few more days. We were able to see a lot more than had we not stayed and we were very happy to have been able to stay there longer.the first day Ashley and I had together we went to a place called the Millenium Art Museum (it looked rainy, so we didnt want to do a lot outside). The museum had a lot of pictures of travelers from the past (such as missionaries that came to china) and explained their impact on the world. Aftwerwards we went to a public park (cost 2RMB or 20UScents) per person to get in, and wandered around inside for a while. by this point in time it was 2 or 3 pm and we saw in the distance a very large tower that looked like it had a bubble at the top for viewing things from. We decided to leave the park from the opposite side (which took about an hour) and walk towards the tall tower. When we got to the tower we found out it was the Central China TV tower (CCTV tower) and decided to go to the top. going to the top only cost about 15USD which included a tour around the top area. We looked around a lot and sent a couple of postcards home from the top of the tower before going down. We also found out they had a rotating diner at the top, but we didnt understand their translations well enough so we were unable to buy tickets for the dinner. After this we went to a bank and stayed inside because it began to downpour rain extremely heavily, after a few minutes we ran to a nearby bus to get back to the train (underground) to go back to our hostel. Before going back to our hostel we stopped at a restaurant called Sizzlers, which had an extremely good tasting cheeseburger (ashley got chicken) and they brought out some breaded shrimp for us for free (I'm guessing because we were foreigners haha) which were extremely good. We then headed back to our hostel and slept for the night. The second day we went to the beijing zoo which took nearly 6 hours to walk all the way through, they had an extremely large area built for animals which was split into 4 sections. After heading back to our hostel we waited a couple of hours before having the hostel drive us to an acrobatic show that was fairly close. the show was very cool and had a lot high jumping and flipping, the end which seemed kinda silly had one of those "death spheres" that its basically a 20ft tall sphere. what they did was add one motorcycle, then add another, and another, until they had 5/6 motorcycles inside this ball driving around going upside down and sideways. After this we went back to the hostel and slept.The third day we went to a Theme Park called Happy Valley, it was also incredibly large and somewhat busy. we went on a lot of rides and had a lot of fun in the theme park, we were there all day until about 7 pm. afterwards we went to a bargaining place that we had gone to before and bought a few things. I bought a chess set, a pearl (not real) ring, Mahjong, some shirts, and some shoes. overall we payed extremely low amounts for everything compared to what they should have been (all things considered they are very good copies of the real thing). Our final day in Beijing Ashley and I went to the Olympic stadium and wandered around this area for a long time. after we went to the Beijing Hard Rock Cafe, which had really nice food and was a 2 floor restaurant. The inside had a dome top that had 5 of the top bands/artists of past musicians and also had 3 large stained glass windows with Elvis, Jimmy Hendrix and another musician in it. It was very nice eating here and relaxing on our final day. After this we left back for hangzhou and slept on the train. (Ashley ate starfish from a nightvendor before we left too, I forgot to mention that haha, though i did not want to eat it)

Trip to Beijing (first half)

So the past 10 days have been very busy for me, We (Central abroad students) went to beijing from the 14th until the 17th, but Ashley and i stayed in Beijing until the 22nd.
The first day of being in Beijing we went to Tian'anmen square and the forbidden city. the square and the forbidden city are huge, and I have many photos I need to upload to show what it looks like. the weather wasn't very clear so we could not see very far but it was still a great sight.
the second day we went to the great wall, which was about 3 hours drive away and then it was a 10k walk back, so about 7 miles or so. The wall was very broken down in areas and i felt dizzy at times being up high and walking on a broken down wall with no sidewalls. we were all very tired by the time we got back and over the course of the day I had about 6 bottles of water. We left at about 10am and got done at about 3pm or so.
the third day we went and saw pandas at the zoo and then went to the Summer palace. the summer palace was very large and had a nice pagoda at the top of a hill inside. After going to the summer palace most of the afternoon we went to a Kungfu show at night which was very cool. it was more of a story than a show though, but it was still exciting to see.
on the final day of the class trip we went to the temple of heaven and saw a few old relics there, there was a lot of walking around to see everything but it was still fun. After seeing this we went to the Pearl/Silk market. This is basically a market to buy clothes, electronics, shoes, and jewelry. Though one must keep in mind that almost everything inside was a knockoff and not actually the real thing. I was able to buy 9 nike/adidas shirts (i figured i would replace all my old ones and i only brought 1 shirt to beijing on accident) for about 50USD total (yes 9 shirts for 50$). I also bought a new pair of Nikes for about 20USD (though I am saving them for when i get home to the US). I was able to purchase a few other things there after ashley and I made a second trip there, but it was all extremely cheap to purchase. After this the other students had to return to Hangzhou, but Ashley and I still had until the 22nd so we went to our Hostel which was next to Tian'anmen square and got situated before going to sleep (we were very tired and had been walking every day so we decided to rest some).

School Trip

The school had a class trip where anyone that wanted to go could go to the Thousand Islands Lake which is about 2 hours away. After arriving there our class had a designated Boat that we took to about 3 or 4 islands to wander around on. The islands are somewhat tourist style and have set paths that everyone is allowed to walk on. The island we went on that had the most stuff had a zoo style area on the path towards the end with a lot of birds inside large cages, though my camera died so I was unable to get more than a couple pictures for the whole day. For lunch we had a chinese style lunch which consisted of local area fish in soups and some random vegetables.
the second island we went to was the tallest in the lake and had a lookout point from the top where you could see out across the lake, though it was fairly smoggy and we could not see very far, it was a very good view.
there were a couple of other islands but we were mainly focused on going to those 2 islands and then boating around. It was overall a nice day besides the smog up high, so it was a good day to go boating.

a few weeks have gone by

A couple weeks ago we had a holiday weekend that lasted 3 days, it was very nice to know that we would have time off. Friday afternoon came along and a friend of ours in the college program let Ashley and I know that she was going to Nanjing for the weekend and we were invited along with. So Ashley and I decided to go with her and stay in Nanjing until monday when we would return to school for tuesday. As the afternoon got later the three of us met up to eat dinner and then take a taxi to the bus stop which would drive us to Nanjing. Ashley asked if I had my passport on me and i jokingly said "no..." (though i actually did) at which point Zoe stated that she did not have hers with her. We were slightly low on time so Ashley and I went to the bus station to wait for zoe while she went back to get her passport. Ashley and I made it onto the bus and began waiting for Zoe to show up. the problem was that it was about 5pm and it took her almost a half hour just to get back to the dorm. when she finally got to the dorm, grabbed her passport and went to leave she could no longer get a taxi. Basically every taxi that was driving past the school was busy and had someone in it. So as our bus left for Nanjing, Zoe was unable to make it there in time for the bus and had to wait until the next day to go to Nanjing. Two others luckily came with us (Robert and his wife Wei-Ling) and so wei-ling was able to speak chinese with the cab drivers in Nanjing and take us to our hotel. the bus ride only took about 4 or 5 hours, but we arrived at close to midnight so we were tired. When we finally arrived at the hotel after walking down a dark allyway we come to find out the hotel is not necessarily the "nicest" hotel around, as it allowed for rooms to be charged by the hour. We were to tired to look around for other hotels and so we stayed the night and woke up around 8 the next morning. we all decided it would be best to find a better hotel (and safer) to sleep in so we checked out at around 9 or 930 and had breakfast. the breakfast was a regular chain that had baozi/jiaozi food and some noodle dishes. After calling some hotels we were able to book a hotel. Zoe arrived soon after and so we went to the hotel to drop our stuff off and begin looking around the town. After a while of shopping we stopped and ate at a fairly good place that translated to "return flavor", it was a lot of simple dishes (kind of fast food like) but overall pretty good. After this we continued to walk around and decided to get massages before going to bed. The shops were fairly standard, mainly clothing shops and trinket shops, though i wasnt really able to find much of anything cool. the next day we ate breakfast at the "pacmans" chain that exists all over china, it was not as good as the hangzhou pacmans though. We went to a shrine that day (Dr. Sun Yet Tsun's burial area) that was extremely large, and literally wandered around there all day (around 6 hours or so). The bus back was EXTREMELY packed, before we even got on the bus we werent sure if all of us would make it onto the bus or not. literally 50 people were shoving to try and make it onto this bus, luckily we all made it on without too much problem. We went to a korean restaurant where we had fairly good sushi before heading back to the hotel to sleep. We again rested and awoke the next day to head home. We decided to buy train tickets to head back, as they were cheaper and were supposed to be nice and easy. the train ride was supposed to be about a 6 or 7 hour ride back (instead of the 4 hour bus ride), but we were ok with that. the train ride ended up being super packed the entire ride there, oh... and it was delayed at took over 10 hours to get us back. We arrived in Hangzhou at about 4am (keep in mind this is now a school morning/day) and took a 30RMB/person (5 of us) hour long taxi ride back to Zheda to get some much needed rest.

the train ride was a very interesting ride, in that at one stop a bunch of farmers got on and sat near us. I assume they had not seen white people very often before as they were amazed that we were on a train going to Hangzhou and liked to ask us plenty of questions. At one point the ones sitting near Zoe literally pulled a WHOLE duck out of a back and began to ate it (well... it was cooked, but it sure had all the parts on it). I watched a movie i had already seen on my ipod but decided i had plenty of time to watch it again (the movie Push), when i finished the movie my ipod died and we still had a couple of hours left before making it back to hangzhou.

The following weekend the group of central students went to Wuzhen, it is an old style town (now inside a city sort of) with a lot of relic type things there. it was not extremely large, but it was very interesting to see the many things that they had. I took a few photos of the area but it began to rain so it was hard to get good photos of everything. The trip was only a day trip so we headed back to Hangzhou and the rest of the weekend was uneventful.

this weekend that just ended was very relaxed, Ashley and I went to Pizza Hut and ordered a half and half pizza, her half was popcorn chicken and my half was... Smoked salmon. haha, it was smoked salmon, with squid/calamari, crab, and to top it off had wasabi sauce on each slice. It is very weird to see the menu of american chain restaurants, most things are normal, but it seems that they like to vary a few things and create dishes that would never really sell in the US (though they are good). Saturday Ashley and I went to a foreign book stored and bought a couple of books (mainly to save for our trip to Xi'an which has a 21 hour train ride... though we bought soft sleeper seats this time so we wont really be bothered by anyone). We then headed back to the college and studied and relaxed. Sunday came around and Ashley and I were going to go to West lake to study/read but it began raining before we left so we had to cancel our plans and stay at the college.

Today has been uneventful, I had another Tingxie (test) over the latest chapter in class and will have my Central History class tonight at about 7. Next week are finals and so I am winding down getting ready to finish the semester and begin travelling around China. I am excited about all the places I am going to (a total of 4 trips in 1 month) going from Xi' an to Huangshan to Tibet to Shanghai. Each trip is a week long while the trip in Shanghai will be our final week in China before leaving to go home. It seems like it is coming up suddenly though I still have the month of May mostly free to explore Hangzhou and take small trips nearby, but then once that month ends I will be travelling a lot before heading home. Hopefully I can blog more, though next week i will have finals and may not have much time to do a lot besides study.

here are a few photos from Nanjing at a museum we went to. I dont have a lot of time to write so i will update more later. the museum is about the japanese coming and killing over 300,000 people.
it was very large but interesting and didnt hide much of what went on no matter how brutal it may have been.

Another week already gone by again?

Things are beginning to move faster now and I am able to move around freely now and explore more of the city. The week itself was not very exciting, I have found a few new places to eat at which are very good, including a place that sells the "baozi soup" things that I saw in Shanghai. Friday was a celebration for Roberts' wife's birthday and so everyone (11 of us) went to KTV which is the karaoke place that we have gone to before. We stayed there for a long time singing songs (including Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, and Haddaway's What Is Love) and just hanging out. Afterwards Ashley lost her cellphone and we were unable to relocate it afterwards. After coming back it was about 12:30am and I had to go to the office. I got to the office and cleaned up my computer and picked up some of my Gundam (think of a model car that you assemble, except this is a space craft that is shaped slightly like a person and is based on an anime(cartoon) that I watched as a kid) and I then realized I hadn't really eaten dinner. I talked to Will and he said the street vendor was open at this point of nite. The street vendor is a group of 2-3 people who set up shop near our school late at night every day and dont open up until about 11:30pm and stay up extremely late. Their food is reliable and cheap, Will ate there a lot last semester so its not a "shady store". I got some noodles, beef, egg, and a few vegetables cooked(5RMB, so about 90cents USD) and headed back to the college to sleep.
Saturday was a bit of a long day which consisted of going to a tea garden (leaving around 8:30/9:00) with an English club that Li is friends with and they allowed us to go to the garden and pick tea leaves which would be cooked and turned into... tea leaves for tea. this sounds funny, but the truth is that making tea leaves actually takes hours and hours to do. This area happens to do it by hand (though they have technology which can do it for you) and each step (out of 8 i think) can take around 2 hours. After walking around a very scenic area we got to go pick tea leaves for about 20 minutes and then we brought our tea leaves down the hill to give to the workers to begin cooking. the problem with this part though was that the leaves required half a day to dry. so they had a pre-prepared batch for us that had been dried, and another batch that had already been cooked (when i say cook, i really mean slowly dried out over a long period of time... you cant really cook the leaves because they would burn then). We were then allowed to test the taste of the tea to see how it tasted. the tea is a green tea that is very light in flavor and tastes pretty good, though it its not amazing. I say this part because we soon came to find out that the price of 1jin (maybe about a kilogram or so... im not exactly sure... it seems like the size of a pound plus a little bit) can be atleast 2500RMB (alot of USD for a little bit of tea).
We then headed back to Hangzhou and then Ashley and I went to a korean barbeque place that we have been to once before with the rest of the group, and got there at 8:30pm to eat (I no longer pay attention to time... I just eat when im hungry). We sat down and went to the buffet area and saw that there was almost no food there, all the meats, vegetables, and pre-cooked food were gone! We weren't sure what happened and I began to wonder if they closed soon. we sat down and cooked a couple of carrots on our skillet style table (the center has a circle of metal with hot coals underneath) and waited for them to hopefully refill the food. After a few minutes a waitress came up to us and asked (in English) "can you help me?". I said "yes..." and waited for her reply, but then she looked like she was waiting for me and asked "what do you want?".
At this point I realized that she had meant to say "can I help you" and so I asked (in Chinese) for some beef and then paused and asked her if she knew what Chicken was (I didn't know the Chinese for it). She said something and sounded slightly confused but walked away after saying ok. very soon she came back with two plates that weren't extremely large, but they were of good size. one had a lot of beef on it, and the other had (luckily) chicken. The beef looked incredibly good and had zero fat on all of it, the chicken also looked very good. we thanked the waitress and began to cook our food. the beef and chicken were both as good as they looked and soon after the waitress came back and asked if we wanted some fish. she asked if she was saying it right and said the word for fish in Chinese, which I replied "Correct(in Chinese), fish(in English)". She also asked us if we wanted fruit and We said yes. She brought back 3 plates, two had oranges, apples, and bananas on it. While the third plate had about 5 fish on it, they were not only whole but had the fins, tail, and head (eyes included) on it. the waitress gave us a demonstration of how to wrap the fish in foil and cook it and to turn it over after a certain amount of time. Ashley and I decided to try it and it was actually very good, I used the chopsticks to pull the skin off (sorry if your get queasy easily) and allow myself to just eat the meat without getting either skin or bones. the fish itself tasted very good so we put a couple more on to eat later on. We also asked the waiter what time they closed at which happened to be 9pm (explaining why there was no food and why people began to leave). Ashley and I quickly finished the rest of our food and went back to campus. The drive to find the place was slightly hard because LiShumin wrote down the wrong address for us and we gave it to a taxi driver which took us in the complete wrong way from where we needed to go. After getting to a completely unknown area and taking a taxi back, Ashley and I took the bus to her work where she knows the place is near and just walked a few blocks to find it. The place cost 50RMB which equates to less than 9USD, which is an incredibly good price for a very nice restaurant that allows you to cook your own food. had we arrived earlier we could have stayed for as long as we wanted and eaten a lot more, but we had our fill for the night and were very happy about how everything went.
Sunday was a very relaxed day, I finished building my Gundam and decided to climb the hill next to our campus with Ashley. The hill was very refreshing and a took a few pictures which I will try to upload here when I can, It is an amazing view at the top because looking at our campus you can see a tiny looking area that contains our campus and a large street in front of it which has another small hill at the end of it (they are "technically" mountains... however I dont think of them as that tall, i dont know the height but its 725 steps to the top). When you turn around from this standpoint you can see the other side of the city which stretches so far that you can't "see" it (haha smog). at the top of this hill you are easily a hundred or so feet above any ove the highest buildings that you can see and it is very nice to be able to look around at the whole area around us. Ashley and I went down the other side of the hill and wound up super close to campus (we expected to need a taxi to go back). We headed back and hung around campus for a while and relaxed.
Today has just been classes, relaxing and then going to McDonalds and wandering around with Alex W. and now I have completed business class and am preparing to head back to my room to finish some homework and then sleep. This week may not be very eventful but this weekend is a holiday so we have a 3 day weekend and its possible Ashley and I will travel. I will be sure to update here when I have completed any travelling or anything.
I hope everything is going well in the US, I apologize if anything I write may be out of place or have bad grammar, I usually write my blogs quickly and don't check my spelling or grammar, so if something doesn't make sense at any point just comment and I will further explain. also if someone has a question about anything or wants a more detailed story, just ask.

trip to shanghai/week of school

This weekend the school ("central's" group) went to Shanghai on Saturday and Sunday to visit a few different places. Starting from Saturday we got up and left at about 7 and took our 2 hour drive to Shanghai. When we first got to Shanghai we went to what is called Yu garden, it is a garden area that has a lot of little shops (though they are very overpriced and hard to bargain with). but after walking around for a while we arrived at the garden itself, which has a lot of old chinese style houses and artifact styled things. the garden was very nice and i took a few pictures while walking around. After the garden the group went to a city planning museum and got to view the plans that were made for the Shanghai expo which had many building plans from each countries contributed plans. this was very interesting and inclued a HUGE overview of Shanghai. To put this into perspective, think of a miniature planning of a single building, and then take that times the number of buildings in Shanghai and you have the 4th floor (i think 4th... maybe 3rd) of this building. after this we went to eat at a restaurant that had a lazy susan. We ordered a lot of food and much of it tasted very good, including sweet and sour pork. After eating here we went to a street that had a lot of shops and clothing style stores that had a lot of lights and neon signs. the stores did not look very interesting but we did get to eat "soup baozi". they are basically the bread and meat buns with some soup inside it. the authentic ones are made with only soup inside that you are supposed to drink with a straw, but ours were kind of a mix and had meat and soup inside. we then went to a very nice massage place and i got a massage for an hour (it was MUCH better than the one near school because it didnt hurt at all). after this we went to bed (after some problems which i shouldnt really talk about because we may or may not have had to do some law dodging things to get a hotel) at a very nice hotel which had breakfast in the morning. after eating breakfast (and drinking 2 large glasses of real milk, which is hard to find). we drove to a museum of science which was about 5 floors high and extremely large with a lot of different sciences, including things from space down to the process of digestion that occurs in the body. everything had english translations which was very nice. After the museum we went to an aquarium which was incredibly large and included the passages where you walked under water (under glass of course) to see the fish, and what was even more interesting was an escalator with a tube of glass over it and as you went down you would slowly go under the water and be able to view all of the fish around you. After spending a lot of time in the aquarium we went to a shopping mall and walked around for a while before stopping at a food place at the bottom floor and had a special dish that was a soup of rice noodles. the other interesting thing about this dish was that they bring out about 15 small dishes of food that had everything from small slices of fish to sausage, to squid and tiny shrimp. the soup came out so hot that even though the dishes were raw, it would cook it over time and allow it to be eaten (though it could be eaten raw). after finally doing all of this we headed back to Hangzhou to finish homework and go to sleep.
Last week I had classes every day, and nothing new happened, though on thursday and friday before going to Shanghai we had some cool events that happened. on thursday we got to go hiking up a mountain that is right behind our school and i got some good pictures taken. the hike up the mountain took about 700 steps (they had counters) up and then another 700 down after walking around the top for a while. on friday we were supposed to go boating but it was too windy so we ended up not going. instead we went to a korean restaurant which was very nice, it cost about 50yuan but what you got was a table and a hot plate with large coals beneath it. we then went to what can be considered a buffet of meat and vegetables (health codes dont exist here luckily, so tasty places like this can exist) where you pile up what you want on a plate and then go and cook it yourself. It is very nice and has a lot of good meats, when you are done with your plate you are able to go back and get more as many times as you want.

this was a quick over view of what I did this weekend, and this week seems that it will be a normal week without many events besides classes. tonight though i went with some of my classmates and my teacher to a place that translates to "grandmas kitchen" where we had many different dishes that the teacher ordered for us. a lot of it was very strange food, such as jellyfish, but overall it was pretty good.