Mystico_tala's Travel Journal || I wish....

Wrapping it up

2006-06-14T02:10:36Z

[EDIT July 2008]
>>Seems like forever ago doesn't it? Anyway, not much to say except my galleries have mostly gone defunct so I'm currently uploading the pictures to a new site. Let me know if the links work or don't.
Haven't done any recent traveling, except to places like Boston and Chicago. Haven't decided to put those up here though. Next time I go somewhere exciting, I'll be back. Count on it.<<

Wrapping up my travel journal as far as my junior year in China goes. Sad to see it all end.

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost

First Semester

Orientation Week in California and Beijing :: Post | Gallery

Silk Road Urumqi :: Post | Gallery

Silk Road Tian Chi :: Post | Gallery

Silk Road Turpan :: Post | Gallery

Silk Road Dunhuang:: Post | Gallery

Silk Road The Great Wall at Jiayuguan :: Post | Gallery

Silk Road Lanzhou :: Post | Gallery

Silk Road Xiahe :: Post | Gallery

Silk Road Xi’an :: Post | Gallery

The Great Wall at Simatai :: Post | Gallery

Forbidden City and Jingshan Park :: Post | Gallery

Summer Palace :: Post | Gallery

The Great Wall on the Ocean :: Post | Gallery

Guilin (Post 1) :: Post | Gallery

Guilin (Post 2) Yangshuo :: Post | Gallery 1 | Gallery 2

Guilin (Post 3) Longshen :: Post | Gallery

Fragarant Hills :: Post | Gallery

Kangxi Grasslands Horseback Riding:: Post | Gallery

Buddhism Field Trip To Monastery :: Post | Gallery

Art Field Trip To Forbidden City and Art Gallery :: Post | Gallery

Badaling Wildlife Reserve :: Post | Gallery

Chengdu :: Post | Gallery

Second Semester

Update: Sept/08 :: The site I had these second semester pictures on is no longer alive, so I'm uploading all the pictures to this site. Individual links in the posts will be updated with the individual galleries as well. Thanks.

Yunnan Kunming :: Post | Gallery

Yunnan Zhongdian/Tibet/Shangri-la (Post 1) :: Post | Gallery

Yunnan Zhongdian/Tibet/Shangri-la (Post 2) :: Post | Gallery

Yunnan Lijiang :: Post | Gallery

Yunnan Dali (Chinese New Year) :: Post | Gallery

Yunnan Xishuangbanna :: Post | Gallery

Shanghai Shanghai, Xitang, Hanzhou :: Post | Gallery

Haerbing/Ice Festival :: Post | Gallery

Houhai/Ice Skating :: Post | Gallery

Langmusi/Xiahe (May Break) :: Post | Gallery | Article

Chengdu/Jiuzhaigou (My sister’s visit) :: Post | Gallery

Forbidden City (with sister) :: Post | Gallery

TianTan :: Post | Gallery

Random :: Post | Gallery

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

再见。

~罗可儿 Nikki

End of the year: Forbidden City, TianTan, Random pictures

2006-06-14T01:57:54Z

Last China post, tying up some of my loose ends.

Pictures of Sam and I when we went to Forbidden City.
Pictures from when I went to TianTan after Sam left.
Random pictures of me, my friends, and China.

Feel free to browse back on some of my other galleries there. I lied about it being my last post, I came up with a better idea. I will create one last post with links to all of my picture galleries for easy access. I hope you all enjoyed reading about my travels, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy going on them. China is in my heart forever. 我爱中国。我想中国。我会从没忘。

Forbidden City

TianTan

Random

~Nikki

Back in the states, reach me on my cell (940)594-1142

End of the Year Trip to Sichuan

2006-06-12T20:45:53Z

Figured that since I've been home for over a week I would update with the (shorter than expected) trip my sister and I took after school ended.

More Pictures
No, the colour isn't edited...

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My sister came in the Saturday after school ended. We started out in Beijing with shopping. Tons of shopping. I don't quite understand how we managed to spend that much money. It's always amazing how a place as cheap as China can be such a drain on your bank account. But it manages to happen every time. I wasn't in the best of moods because of everyone leaving, but I was happy that she was in town. And Brigette stayed and we left the same day, so it made it more bearable.

First thing I did (after shopping) was take her to the Great Wall, something you have to do while in China. There is a section close to Beijing, so we just went there. It's a very steep climb and very hot, so we weren't there to long. One of those Chinese tourist things: go, get a picture in front of it, and leave. Not completely, but almost.

First step of the actual vacation (for me anyway) was heading to Chengdu (capital of Sichuan). We were meeting up with a friend of mine (Brigette) and all the people she was showing around the day after we got in to town. The flight wa delayed so we didn't get in until 1am and we had a horrible time trying to find our hostel. But anyway, the hostel was actually really fantastic. I love the hostels in China, they are the best, lots of character.

Anyway, first real day of the vacation we headed to the suburbs of Chengdu to visit the pandas (which I've done before). It was a lot of fun. We got to hold a red panda, but not a regular one. The panda baby was 'Jing Jing', which is the olympic mascot, so they raised the price to hold it and the mayor was coming or something, so it turned out to be pretty impossible. It was disappointing, but couldn't be helped. Note: This day is the day my sister got completely fed up with eating Chinese food for every meal. We had Pizza hut for dinner.

Chengdu is a pretty gross city, so we only stayed for the one day to go see the pandas. We headed out the next day on a 10 hour bus ride to go to Langmusi, a national park. Left my passport at the hostel so we had to run back 30 minutes before the bus left. That was stressful. Wouldn't have been quite a problem since we were back 2 days later, but we didn't know that at that time.
The scenery was great, sometimes I the bus is the best way to travel because of the scenery. But also the most uncomfortable. Once we got in and got a hotel my sister broke down and desperately wanted to go home. We called out parents, her boyfriends, etc, and after a lot of thinking ended up arranging to head back to Chengdu after a day in the park and then fly back to Beijing so she could change her flight and go home early. I think the travelling was too much for her, maybe we should have just stayed in Beijing. Travelling on your own without having tickets to go anywhere or hotels to stay at is kind of stressful. That's probably what got to her. That and not being able to talk to anyone, which I went through for months. But for someone who doesn't like travelling, China is a big step.

So, went to Jiuzhaigou park the next day after getting tickets back to Beijin and everything settled. Can't say I minded heading back to Beijing, I get homesick too, just for Beijing instead of Texas...
She did enjoy Jiuzhaigou though, it was amazingly beautiful. The lakes were honestly iridescent blue and completely clear no matter how deep they were, I've never seen anything like it. And then just the forest and hiking, it was fun. There were tons of tourists there, and some Tibetan dancing at the front of the park, but once you get in and walk on the paths more than 20 meters you were away from all the crowds of the Chinese tourists who barely ever leave the bus, and then only walk far enough to take a picture. I wanted to point them in the right direction to get to Disneyland, but I restrained myself. But seriously, some of them had business suits or high heels on. It was ridiculous. Sam and I managed to walk around most of it and were there all day, it was fantastic.

Headed back to Beijing. I wanted to kill someone on the bus ride back to Chengdu. A few people actually. No coffee, a small child, the NOISIEST, LOUDEST people in the world right in front of us and surrounding us, and then the loud, noisy idiots wanted to listen to music. Horrible, awful, loud chinese music. I nearly went mad.
More problems: We got to Chengdu and China has this wonderful thing that you can't pay for plane tickets with a credit card and my sisters bank only let her get out a certain amount of money a day, so we were short money, running around for an ATM that we could take money out. It was a disaster. We ended up asking the hostel for a loan. It was stressful. Just something to add to it. And, obviously not happy about being in Chengdu, I hate that city.

It all worked out in the end and we made it back to Beijing. Did normal things while we were back. Took Sam to the Forbidden City, more shopping, Houhai, Lama Temple, massages, etc. Much more relaxing to travel around in a city I'm more familiar.
Went with Brigette and her group to the Qing dynasty restaurant down the street from our school. They have a Peking Opera performance during dinner. It's a lot of fun.

And that's the end of the trip with my sister. She headed back (bringing one of my suitcases with her so I could pack another one). I spent the remainder of my time there packing mostly, visiting a few of the sites I didn't get to see (being one, I'll post pictures later...ok, so this won't be my last post), just chilling pretty much. It took a ton of time to pack.

Well, since I'm going to need another post, I'll leave the rest for when I get the rest of my pictures online and get the camera of my sister and I at the Forbidden City developed. Wait up for me ;)

~Nikki

我想中国。

Langmusi/Xiahe trip

2006-05-15T05:35:16Z

Pictures from my most recent trip to Langmusi and Xiahe. Enjoy.

Pictures

~Nikki

May Break

2006-05-09T14:08:36Z

So, when I can get an internet that works decently I’ll upload the small Tibetan towns that I visited last week with 3 friends for May break, Langmusi and Xiahe; some of the vacation was amazing, some was awful. The awful part was kind of scarring so I don’t know if I’ll ever actually update on this vacation. The captions on the pictures will serve as my story. Which thankfully leaves off the last part of the trip, seeing as how no one except the fucking Chinese paparazzi wanted to take pictures. Suffice it to say, seeing someone die in front of you really makes you conscious of your own mortality. I’m just thankful it wasn’t any one of my friends that I was with, it could have been any of us.
RIP
Just showed up in China Daily today
Dutch tourist falls to his death

Tragedies do happen. We can discover the reason, blame others, imagine how different our lives would be had they not occurred. But none of that is important: they did occur, and so be it. From there onward we must put aside the fear that they awoke in us and begin to rebuild.
Paulo Coehlo

"Try to ride the wave of emotions and accept that feelings of sadness and pain are unavoidable and are heightened during certain times. The intense feelings will pass, but grief is an ongoing process. Don't ever expect closure. It gets easier with time, but there will always be an empty space at the table," Bozich-Keith said.
Robert Preidt

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamador was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

Old Houhai pictures, and new stories

2006-04-22T15:35:55Z

Just a picture album, self explanatory, I don’t want to write about it :P

Skating in Houhai
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^^Last winter

So, my friend's (Brigette) sister was in town last week. On Wednesday us and Pickup went shopping early in the morning (I spent a LOT of money, bought some beautiful things though, I'll post pictures of the jewelry I had made). After that we went to Houhai and grabbed some lunch and walked around (Pickup headed back to school for class). So, let me tell you a little about Houhai. They are these redone Hutongs, traditional, old-style Chinese city living. What you picture when you picture China. Old town, winding paths, etc. All redone for tourists, of course. In the middle is a huge lake that you can take boats in or skate on during the winter and restaurants and bars around the lake. Fantastic, gorgeous place. Perfect.

Brigette has been planning this since October! And we were all in on it. So, we were walking around and two of our friends were going to the airport to pick up her sister's boyfriend. Who flew in without ANYONE knowing (all of us in China knew, but no one in the states or Brigette's sister knew). We walked to the bridge that goes over the lake/stream(at that point) and her boyfriend just walks out of the crowd in front of her. She had no idea he was coming and he's also in the military so he isn't supposed to be here! He had to grow out his hair and get special permits for it. We back off the bridge to watch and he drops to one knee. We were freaking out and crying, lol.
It was amazing. I've never seen anyone get proposed to before! Some guy snapped some pictures of us while it was happening and is going to send them. But *sigh* It was amazing. Could you imagine?! He flew out all the way to China to surprise her and propose. In that setting, on a nice day, it was perfect. What a story to tell people! We were freaking out all day and being all sappy and everything, it was amazing. One of the best days EVER!

This weekend half of our group went to ShanHaiGuan, the part of the great wall on the ocean that I went to last semester (i.e. I didn’t want to go again). Scott and I decided to wake up early and head downtown as he has never been to The Forbidden City. So we did that. Left at 10 in the morning and walked for nearly 8 hours straight. Spent tons of time in the forbidden city and then when we got out we found a xiao chi place (small restaurant). It was pretty decent and the prices weren’t bad. Mine was 8RMB and Scott’s was 7RMB. To go along with that I had a bowl of rice which never costs more than 1RMB and Scott got a drink that is usually about 3RMB. The problem with that is, those two things aren’t on the menu. So they tried to SCREW us!! They wanted 6RMB for the rice (ridiculous) and 15RMB for the tea!! Can you believe that? 36RMB for lunch? We got pissed off. I asked them how much they would have charged us if we were Chinese and why they were trying to screw us because it wasn’t on the menu. We handed her about 20RMB and tried to leave. We got into a huge screaming fit that the other customers thought was hilarious. She knew she was being a horrible person, we just walked out. It was unbelievable. I’ve never had that happen to me before! We are in a touristy part of town, but I couldn’t imagine many tourists going in to that kind of place.
We walked around Tiananmen wishing we had kites on the windy day and found a small street on the south side of it to do some shopping. This street was fantastic, I had never been down there before. It’s not a street, just an alley way with shops on either side, but you go down it and you actually feel like you are in China, which doesn’t always happen here. It was pretty amazing and just assaulted your senses. Scott bought some things and I tried to conserve money for the trip next week. Fun times. Came back and crashed, it tires you out.

Haerbing Trip - old

2006-04-18T16:37:39Z

Haerbing
06/2/19

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Who ever would have thought that going to Siberia would be such a nice getaway? Sometimes you just have to get out of Beijing. Weekend trips are fantastic.
Another looooong train ride filled with games and horrible sleeping.
Well, on to the goods. First stop was the Tiger Park. Really famous in the area. Not only for going to see all the tigers (and ligers!) but you can buy food to feed to them. Not only steaks, but also LIVE food. It’s horrible. We met up with some people there, there was a huge group of us, and they collected money to buy a LAMB. They knew I was a vegetarian so they didn’t even bother asking me. I think it’s disgusting. There is nothing natural about that. And even if there was, getting joy out of seeing another sentient being being ripped apart is just a little more than sick. In my opinion anyway. It was so sad, the jeep came speeding out. The tigers knew what was happening and they ran after it. Without even stopping the jeep they opened the door and just pushed this little lamb out. Poor thing looked so dazed, but only for a little while. I turned away, but the tigers just went at it. Gross. The only 2 non-TBC people on our bus bought a chicken. That was gone even faster. The jeep came out and opened the window and threw the chicken on top of the jeep. It didn’t even hit the top, the tigers jumped on the roof of the jeep and grabbed it in their mouth. It was gone fast.
The rest of the place, aside from the open areas were really sad. Small concrete cages, and even in the open areas you could see something like the mange going around. Such is China though.
We went back to town and chilled around a fantastic Russian style church next door to our hotel and saw Christian (a friend from last semester who is studying up there).

Afterwards we went to what we all came to do, the ice festival. I can’t explain, and I’m sure the pictures can’t show. Huge ice palaces, life-size, amazing. Great Wall slide, a battle ship, an ice bar.

Sick again, or still. My immune system is horrible. But anyway, I tried to have fun the second day there before we left to go back to Beijing. We had the majority of the day. A group of us went to look around and found this snow hill that they had made that you could pay to slide down on tubes!! So, of course we did….for HOURS. It was so much fun. There were only 6 of us, but we took over the place and were quite a spectacle, like we usually are. We would hold each others tubes and go down in a chain, go down 2 or 3 in a tube, hit each other and fling each other around on the way down, run and jump. I’m sure it didn’t do much for my cold, but it was fun. The Chinese people watching us even got into it too :)

Shanghai Trip!

2006-04-16T08:14:59Z

上海
06/3/27-06/3/31

More Pictures!

I wasn’t terribly impressed with Shanghai. In all, the trips this semester were nothing to last semester. They got extremely lazy. After a 14-hour train ride with no sleep because Kat was sick (ended up being kidney stones, ouch) we didn’t even get to go to a hotel. We dropped our stuff off and headed out to the Oriental Pearl Tower. This city is so disgustingly smoggy; it gives Beijing a run for its money. I’m sure on a building that tall you would have a fantastic view, but as it was, you could hardly see anything.
One thing you could see though was this deliciously evil looking building that began a huge chain of discussions like you wouldn’t believe. So, Scott, Pickup, Brigette, and I started this 2nd world. Which is ridiculous, but honestly, without it we would have been bored to death for the entire time we were in Beijing. So, we decided that we needed an evil building to start an evil corporation. We had every detail down. Our jobs, the layout of the building, what our cover “good” company would be, we even started recruiting people for other jobs. We got Father Riyo to do a cover-up business ethics/community outreach to keep up press, Andy for the accounting and business, etc, etc, on and on. We went on for days. Who am I kidding it still comes up.
We went to a museum on the first floor of the Pearl Tower. It had wax figures, which quite frankly, terrify me.
We went to “The Bund” which was just a street along the river with old huge European buildings, eh. We went to the French Concession too, still nothing much, it did make you feel like you were in Europe though. We went into this nice hotel and while we were there a bride and groom were taking wedding photos, it was fantastic, her dress was gorgeous.
Another thing that bothered me about this place/trip was that I had the WORST time eating. I’ve never had so much trouble being a vegetarian before but for some reason I just kept getting screwed over. Either they wouldn’t have anything on the menu, they would forget to bring out my food, they would lie to me telling me that they could do something without meat, etc. It was terrible; I was only full at the end of the trip when we went to Thai food. I’m used to that though, you never really get full being a vegetarian, lol.

We went to Xitang after Shanghai. It was a cute town, kind of touristy, another one of those ‘Old Towns’ that the Yunnan trip was famous for. This one had a lot fewer people though. It was fantastic. They called it a water town, or canal town. The entire thing is built along all these (guess) canals. Very Venice like, or as close as you can get in China. The water is lined with traditional style Chinese buildings, little shops (not too touristy either). Shopping was pretty much the main focus, there wasn’t much else to do in the town. And the entire place only had about 3 restaurants. This town is the first place you really noticed the peach and cherry blossoms that are all in bloom now. It was gorgeous with the traditional Chinese and water. We were only there for one day, but it was probably long enough to see everything that was going on there, as pretty as it was. TBC really didn’t plan anything for this trip, transportation and board. Oh well, the old kids usually don’t do what TBC plans anyway.

Oh, now this is something I wouldn’t recommend for anyone. We left Xitang and went to Suzhou, which I’ve heard is a fantastic town, but we didn’t get to see any of it. We went to some gardens for a few hours and then, get this, went on a boat for 14 hours. It would have taken 2 if we drove. It was horrible. I get motion sick, so even with the Dramamine it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Pickup, who is always looking out for me (yea right) convinced me that if I drank enough I wouldn’t even notice. So after the terrible dinner on the boat, we brought out the 2 cases of beer that we bought before we got on the boat and bought the boat out of all the beer they had and had a night full of drinking games. It was fun, especially with the staff sitting right next to us, they are cool people. The night ended badly though. The Cali-boys (two kids, they have no separate identities, they are from California and thus, Cali-boys) got pissed that we bought all the alcohol. Not the fact that they didn’t get it, I said I would give them mine, but just the principle that we got the last of them. I thought Scott was going to get into an actual fight with them; it was all highly unnecessary and stupid. I went to sleep, lol. I’m not getting caught up in that. The music started playing in the morning (much like it does on the trains) and it slowly crept into my dreams. It was weird.

The destination of the incredibly long boat ride was Hanzhou. Words cannot describe how much I LOVE this city. We got to the hotel, once again, too early to check in or take a shower. We had 2.5 hours to kill before we had anything planned (it was 6:45 in the morning). Obviously, the first stop was coffee, we walked around the lake and park that was across the street for our hotel (prime location) and got coffee. The city was beautiful. Probably one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever been to in China. There is a huge lake, tons of trees, cherry blossoms, walkways, and it’s really advanced, sometimes you barely felt like you were in China (like when we were sitting at TCBY). And the weather! How can I express?? It was PERFECT.
We headed out with TBC to a pottery thing that was uninteresting. We had some time before heading out for the next part of our TBC planned excursion to grab lunch. So we did and then decided that we didn’t want to go. So a few of us rented bikes and biked around for a few hours. Around the whole lake, there were so many beautiful parts of it! I want to go back so badly; I can’t even explain what this city is like. Anyone going to China should skip Shanghai and go straight to Hanzhou. It was the best day of the vacation. Probably of the entire semester.

That was the vacation in a nutshell. A nice, relaxing break from the horrors of Chinese class everyday.

Yunnan Trip, Xishuanbanna

2006-04-15T09:28:15Z

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Flew to Xishuangbanna. How you can ever want to go anywhere else is beyond me. It’s like a tropical paradise. It’s a lot like Thailand, which means it had the most fantastic Thai food which I ate for nearly every meal every day we were there. It was 75 degrees and gorgeous, especially compared to the barren, frozen wasteland that Beijing was at the time. I could have stayed there forever with the sun and the breeze and the palm trees. It was THE life. We wandered around town and then sat by the pool at the hotel. Could it get much better? Didn’t think so ;)

We didn’t have Thai food every night. One of the nights we were there we managed to find this spectacular restaurant. I don’t know if I can even explain it. None of the tables were inside, they were all in little gazebo’s. You walk in through a typical Chinese round door and there is a garden there, palm trees, bridge over a pond, ferns, and all around you big patios/gazebo’s with tables in it (either a couple or one per). Mosquito or cloth netting sometimes around them. Tropical paradise is really the only way to describe it. We had a problem ordering, more than usual, and the waitress was not understanding. She said some nasty things and nasty words to us which I imagine she thought we didn’t understand. Sarah called her out on it and the poor girl looked really embarrassed. She was really nice the rest of the night, go figure.

Next day was an option, and, surprise, I chose the Buddhist temple. Different this time though! It was a Hinayana temple, Dai/Thai style. First one I’ve seen, it was really interesting. We went to another temple after that, after a bumpy ride on the back of a cart through tea fields. It was surrounded by a very tropical looking forest, it was fun to get lost in. We stopped for tea on the way back to town. It was terrible but they had a traditional blessing ceremony thing and they said something and wrapped string around your wrist and tied it. 4 months later and I still have it, it’s getting weak though. It won’t last through the summer.
Not much to talk about, it was a slow moving day and I was still suffering from a cold that I had nearly the entire trip. Change of weather wasn’t working for me, as fantastic as it was.

The last night of the vacation was a homestay in a village that we had to walk 45 minutes or so to get too. Bad idea on TBC’s part to make us gross and sweaty and then wake up and get on a plane. I felt sorry for the other passengers.
This was an actual homestay, nothing like the one we had in Lijiang. The houses were typical style houses for that area, pretty much an open room on stilts. We slept on pads on the floor and had pretty mosquito netting around us. I was in the house with Kat, Maria, and Alex Graeve. There was a short basketball game with the locals and then we headed back to the house for some dinner before the “party” that night. We met our hosts family’s son while we were back. 20 years old, he was fantastic. We just started drinking. TBC provided each house with some beers for us, and as Kat doesn’t drink beer, she pulled out some Vodka. He thought that was hilarious and brought out some Bijiu. Yuck, lol. We were downing everything. He joined us for dinner (amazing amounts of food!) and the grandpa came over too and started drinking with us! The kid put on some dance music so we started dancing with the grandpa, haha, it was hilarious. We figured it was the only thing that would make the TBC “party” interesting.
It was a typical party, hired dancing once again. They continued playing music at the end of it and we all played with the kids and danced. It was a lot of fun. Probably more fun for the 4 of us than everyone else.
Another ceremony or tradition that they do is set off homemade hot air balloons!! It was fantastic. It is pitch black out there and they have a big balloon/bag. They hold fires in it to heat up the air and then light something on fire and let it go! The bag isn’t totally clear, so the whole thing glows. We watched it until it disappeared into the stars. And then I imagine that there was so much oxygen that the whole thing caught on fire and came back to the ground. It was great to be out there at night with the stars. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many in my life, especially living in Beijing for the past year were the only stars I see are electric ones that the put on the tall building across the street.
The roosters started at 4:30am and didn’t stop. I could have killed them all.

Flew back to Beijing. It was nice to be home, but the weather was horrible, as usual. And thus the trip ended. This was 4 months ago, I might be a little behind? lol

Dali!! New Years!

2006-04-09T08:28:41Z

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Nothing, I imagine, is quite as interesting as Chinese New Years. Quite honestly, the Chinese people as a whole really know how to celebrate for holidays. I’m sure it would have been insane had we been in places like Beijing or Shanghai it would have been past the point of insane, but here in Dali is was insane enough.
The first night we were in Dali we were supposed to be doing one of the ‘home stays’ but it was cancelled due to….bird flu. Kind of over the top, I haven’t heard anything about it for months, but whatever. I was much more excited to actually be in a city for New Years rather than a village where all they do is watch TV (kind of like our New Years?). We had dinner at a place called ‘Tibetan Café’ which had mostly western food, go figure, but our tour guide probably knew the owner (both Tibetans) and was able to arrange a huge buffet very quickly. The little that I had was wonderful, still starving after that, but being a vegetarian, I got used to that rather quickly. Kat and I went to the dinner full out in our Tibetan outfits that we got in Zhongdian. Ichi (ee-ch-ee) showed us how to properly wear our jackets tied around our waste and everything. Him and the rest of our Tibetan tour guides thought we were the best things ever, lol. I even had someone in the street say ‘hello’ to me in Tibetan (Ta-shee day-lay). Which made me all kinds of happy.
Walking back to the hotel (maybe 10 minutes away? At the most) was one of the adventures of my life. I feel like I was inches away from death. They had been selling firecrackers all day, probably all week, and were setting them off in the street. Had to be hundreds at different points. Every 5 feet one would be going off. I can’t even explain the mess that it was, 乱七八糟 (bad point in your life when Chinese explains things better than English). It was ridiculously dangerous, the place was quite honestly like a war zone. Everything you see in movies with people running and ducking and jumping out of the way. And then you wouldn’t see one and a giant one would go off in front of you nearly making you deaf and blind. Scary as hell.
Being a party day, we had to have a small party of our own. People were getting too afraid to go outside so we stayed in the hotel for a little while playing games. There is this Korean game (I won’t EVER try to explain it on a computer) called “Bunny bunny carrot carrot” (I do remember that carrot was ‘tungan’ though). Tons of weird and hilarious hand games. But really, it was ridiculously stupid. A few of us decided to go outside and check out the chaos ensuing outside. We ended up finding some friends in a bar. I got to talk to one of our friends that was in Beijing that I haven’t seen in a while (he moved up to Haerbing, i.e. Siberia, for school). I had one drink and headed back with a few people. We went back to the hotel at least one hour later to find them still playing those stupid hand games. Since we couldn’t go to sleep (they were in my room) we decided to turn around and go back to the bar. The party cleared out before we left the second time and headed out with us. Stayed for a while, had a pretty decent time with the rest of our group and some Chinese people at the bar. I came back and told the remainder of the people left in the room to get the hell out, I wanted to sleep.

The next day was the actual New Years Day. More and more the place reminded me of New Orleans during Mardi Gras with the throngs of people. We woke up early and as we walked out of the hotel there was a parade with a dragon going by. We headed to a semi-secluded courtyard to practice our own dragon dance. Took us a while because we kept getting stopped by multiple random dragons winding down the road. The moves are actually quite complicated. Not so much during the actual parades, but we performed in a public square; weaving, swirling, doubling back and under, etc. Intense, it was fun, we were such an attraction for the Chinese tourists.
After eating we went back to the square for a show with singers, dancers, etc. There were tons of people so everyone except for Scott (who towers over everyone) couldn’t see. They made some TBCers do some acts, no one really wanted to go up though. Brigette ended up doing some Tai Chi with Jia and Sarah sang a communist song (which was a big hit throughout the entire trip when they made people sing).
Later we had a tea ceremony that was horrendously boring. I went back to the hotel and stayed in since I was kind of sick. Sleep helps :)

The next day there were options. I chose to go on a hike/visit a Taoist temple on the top of a huge mountain. We hiked down and took a cable car up, we are entirely too lazy. I have to say, this trip didn’t change or improve my view on Taoist temples. Poorly built Buddhist Temples. Tacky and ugly. But when you look at the philosophies of the religion it doesn’t surprise. The whole trip wasn’t very entertaining, but climbing down the mountain definitely kept your mind occupied. Why they continually take us on these dangerous treks after someone broke their back last semester, I will never understand. It was an intense slope and the ground was covered with ridiculously slippery pine needles. The best thing about the entire hike was that the side of the mountain we were climbing down (it has to face a certain direction) was a giant graveyard. Sometimes there was one right in front of you, or a group of them in the forest next to you. But of course I like cemeteries, I guess I’m just morbid like that.

The afternoon we had a ’cruise’ which was a bit boring (uninteresting day apparently). Not really much to see, but the weather was nice and Graeve and I made it a booze cruise. Then went back to town, grabbed some pastries and cake at a fantastic bakery run by deaf people and chilled for the rest of the night.

We took off for Xishuanbanna in the morning!

Almost done!! Really! 真的！

~Nikki

Lijiang!!

2006-03-21T11:08:12Z

Bet you all missed me ;)

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Pictures of Tiger Leaping Gorge

The next couple days weren’t as interesting if you compare it to Zhongdian, in my mind at least…but then again, I’m slightly obsessed with Tibetan culture. We left Zhongdian and headed to Lijiang. The bus ride was a BREEZE compared to what we had to go through on the Silk Road. The new kids complained nonetheless. We stopped at Tiger Leaping Gorge on the way there. Some story about a man chasing a tiger and the tiger used this stone in the middle of these rapids to jump across to the other side. Not a very interesting story. The mountains were beautiful though. We had to climb down to the gorge, which shouldn’t have been too hard. Well, it wasn’t really, we were down there for a while and then we had to climb back up. You didn’t really notice, but we were still in really high elevation. I thought my lungs were just going to give out on me, they burned so bad. Even worse for the returning students, our Beijing lungs just couldn’t handle it at all. We were all weezing for the rest of the day, I felt like a smoker.
Got to Lijiang, the hotel was BEAUTIFUL! Old style architecture on the outside (we stayed in ‘old town’…every town we went to had an ‘old town’…just a reminder of how touristy this trip was). The town was pretty neat, I never even left the old town area, but it was so huge, you didn’t have to. There was a mountain in the distance that could be seen anywhere in the entire town, even if you got lost on the windy back streets.
A group of us left the second we checked in to go look around. Scott, Reg, and I ended up in our own group as people slowly started disappearing. The place was very touristy, but I would come to find out later that it wasn’t all like that. But the main parts were and they were just crawling with people. Like all other tourist areas, tons of shops that sell the exact same thing and inflated prices. The place was beautiful though. Really old, classic Chinese architecture that people always picture when they think of China. All of it was completely renovated and the government was doing a lot to keep it that way, cobblestone streets and all. It was beautiful at night too, there was a river that wound through the whole town, you would stumble upon it when you didn’t even know where you were. The bigger streets were lined with trees and all the streets were lined with lanterns, whether it was permenant or just for the new year, I have no clue.
We ran into some other people and managed to get horribly lost. The place never ends. It started getting dark the same time the shops starting getting sparser as we got into a more residential area of the old town. Still with the same beautiful, renovated architecture and very small cobblestone streets winding every possible way. It’s easy to get lost, the place is a maze. We eventually found out way out and ate dinner. It was late by the time that happened so we headed back to the hotel. I finished the horrible book I was reading. Wow, it was bad. Twisted Branch or something like that?

The next day was relatively uneventful. Stopped at another little village that had become touristy also. The highlight of that was going to visit this insane Chinese medicine doctor there. He was crazy, lol, but quite a resume. Lots of famous people attached to his name, it was impressive. He had a documentary on himself and some books. Friends with a famous botanist, Bock or something…

We went to our ‘home stay’ that night. We always have homestays on these trips, but this one was hardly that. It turned out to be 10 minutes from the hotel we stayed at before and was a guest house. Definitely not as hard core as the silk road, which I LOVED. But oh well. That night, it just got better, once again they paid people to dance for us. It wasn’t like the Uygers last semester where it was a party, we sat there and they danced. It was a show basically. Whatever.

Updates are few and far between aren’t they? I’m leaving for Shanghai in a week…it’s a problem, lol.
Next update from the Yunnan trip is New Year’s in Dali.

Rest of Zhongdian

2006-03-03T09:25:33Z

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The altitude was being very unkind to me. That or I had a 24 hour flu thing. I was horrible.
The day started well though. We woke up and went to a monastery, I love going to monasteries, they are so peaceful. This one was a mini replication of Potala Palace in Lhasa, looked exactly like it! But well….smaller. I broke off from the group to go look at something out of the way and couldn’t find them for the entire rest of the day. I found a few other people that had gotten lost too, so we stuck together. I’m glad we broke off, it’s easier to enjoy places like that in small groups. The actual reason we lost the group? We got occupied by a pig that was walking around. *Shakes head* Pathetic, I know.
All of the buildings you could go into had stairs to reach the roof. Alex Ho and I were the first ones to head up to the top of the first building. The floor right below the roof had a couple rooms for monks, one of the was a prayer room. The whole floor was just plain wood, nothing too fancy, but we heard a monk chanting and decided to check it out. There was a small little room as beautifully decorated as the prayer hall with one monk sitting in it reciting scripture it looked like. We cautiously and quietly stepped in to look around, when we were leaving the monk gave us a huge smile. Which would make anyone happy. When we went back downstairs Alex was talking to some monks about random things, like the weather. All the monks were so ridiculously friendly and helpful, which, to be frank, isn’t always the case. I’ve run into a lot of monks that were less than friendly and less than happy. I always expects monks to be kind, and the ones here definitely were.
In the main prayer hall there was a monk that was blessing people and handing out prayer bracelets. He was on his cell phone when I walked up…Oh, China. I spent a lot of money donating to this place. I could have stayed there all day, just wandering around or sitting around, doing nothing. But, alas, TBC rushed us on out. Probably would have been a better idea to stay as my day took a nose-dive off a cliff after that.
We got back to town and did some shopping for the kids at the orphanage that we were going to visit later in the day. Lots of toys. I spent tons of money on toys for these kids. On the way back to the hotel after shopping and grabbing some lunch, people decided to stop at an internet café. I originally wasn’t going to, it was like, 4 days into the trip. But whatever, it was cheap, thought I would just check up on my mail. First e-mail I check was from Sharon telling me that one of my friends from high school had died in a car accident. I won’t even go into that, but I was slightly devastated and remained partially so for the remainder of the trip. It’s easy to push these things from your mind when you are out traveling like I was, so it didn’t really hit me hard until I got back to Beijing. But enough of that.
I wasn’t terribly interested in anything the rest of the day. The orphanage was fun, the kids did some dancing for us, we danced with them (I sat off to the side with a few other people who just weren’t feeling the dancing) and had some cake with them. The kids were adorable. I got a message from Gunpo saying that him and Tsebho wanted to go out to dinner. I wasn’t really feeling up to it, but how many times will I see them again? So I went anyway, brought Kat with me.
Before dinner, Kat, Alex Ho, Jia, and I went shopping and ended up buying Tibetan clothing. Aho bought an awesome jacket and Kat and I went ALL out and bought an entire Tibetan outfit. Shirt and dress, Jacket/overcoat thing, and a hat. Awesome. Cheap too, best ever. While we were walking around we ran into Gunpo and Tsebho, which was weird. Especially since I wasn’t supposed to let Peg (head staff) know that Gunpo was in town. Our current tour guide and Gunpo (a previous tour guide) used to be best friends but had a HUGE falling out. Peg was better friends with the current tour guide, so kept him along. Gunpo just said it was better not to let them know he was there. But Jia was there, who is also staff. Got a couple questions about how I knew them, but she thankfully dropped it after that and I don’t think mentioned it to Peg. It was great to see them again though, and I was happy about deciding to go to dinner.
So Kat and I went to dinner with them that night at a hot pot restaurant in old town. I wasn’t feeling well at the start of the day, and it just got worse during dinner. I had a great time though. I think we spent the entire time laughing at the stories of those crazy Tibetans. They went through a hole in the fence on the border of China and Burma because technically they aren’t allowed in there. They have some crazy stories. I love those guys. Haha, and Tsebho told the owner of the restaurant who they are friends with that I was his wife :) That made my day. Instead of going out afterwards, we decided to head back to the hotel because I felt like shit. I got really sick and passed out on my bed shivering and just feeling horrible. I don’t know what my problem was. Bad food couldn’t do that to you.
The next day was the “culture” day. If you chose to do the culture option you get to go to a sacred hill with a temple on the top and make your own prayer flags. It was really gorgeous once you get up there. Climb up to the top of the hill (harder than it sounds, bloody altitude) and it is completely covered in prayer flags. Some places you can’t even see through them. It was an amazing sight. We made our own prayer flags and sewed them onto a string to hang up. We were all supposed to dedicate them to people, so I made mine for Eric.
Kept my promise and went out with Gunpo and Tsebho that night. The beer on an empty stomach actually made me feel better, which is weird. We met them in old town, which is a renovated but really old part of the town, looks like it’s entirely for tourists, but I imagine people live there too. There is a square in the middle of it were people go to dance every single night. The rest is filled with shops and bars and restaurants. I had mentioned to some people that I was going to see them because I knew of some people that wanted to meet them. So they met up with us later. At the beginning it was just us, Kat and Reg. Tsebho brought up the wife thing with a straight face and Reg didn’t have a clue what was going on, it was hilarious. After that TONS of people show up, there had to be 15 of us there by the end of the night. Tons of different discussions going on at the same time. About everything; their crazy adventures, how to pick up girls in Tibetan, political topics, economics, history, etc. It was a good time. Everyone else loved Tsebho and Gunpo too. They were all freaking out on the way back to the hotel about how they had just hung out with Tibetans, etc, etc. It was hilarious, but I know I was like that when I first met them too.
Got into the elevator and got out on my floor. Peg was there and the people in the elevator, say ‘We just hung out with Tibetans!’ and Conor shouts out ‘Gunpo!’ The look of shock on Peg’s face was priceless, but I was scared nonetheless and bolted to my room. I couldn’t believe he actually said that *shakes head*
I was sad leaving and not knowing when I would ever see Gunpo and Tsebho again, if ever. One of those fleeting friendships in life or something. Veronica was right though, I felt pretty bad ass telling people I had Tibetan friends that I had known for a while and then getting to hang out with them. Plus sides of being a returning student ;)

What’s next, Lijiang I think? All right. I’m only a little behind O_O

Zhongdian Day 1

2006-02-15T13:31:52Z

06/1/22

Zhongdian
Tibet
Shangri-la

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Woke up at 4:30am to catch a plane, which is ridiculously early. It wasn’t even light out yet, but once it was light out it was quite a view. I love being in planes during sunset or sunrise, it’s beautiful, I always take pictures (just go and check out my pictures, there are tons). Of course, I think just about everyone loves sunsets/rises. This one was especially gorgeous because by the time it got light we were passing over the southern part of the Tibetan mountains (cultural Tibet that is). Wow. Huge mountains coming up from the clouds. Damn impressive sight, I was already in love with Tibet. The turbulence was once again ridiculous right before landing. We weren’t lucky on this trip, the flight to Kunming and then this one? Damn. This wasn’t as bad, but it was probably scarier seeing as how we were having turbulence almost 30 ft off the ground.
Not only did we get the whole airplane to ourselves, but also this “airport” was amazing! SO small! We were completely isolated and it was just a landing strip. Definitely a first for me. The sign on the airport saying Shangri-la and the mountains all around was a fantastic first sight. God, I love Tibet! It was exactly how I thought it would be, people walking around in traditional clothing, even in the city, the architecture, prayer flags, stupas, everything. Exactly like I thought it would be. Loved it already. Even in the middle of winter when everything is brown and dead. Could you just imagine THE Shangri-la in the summer? It must be amazing. Gunpo and Tsebho grew up in grasslands nearby and I remember them telling me about it. Sounds fantastic.

The town itself didn’t quite capture me like Xiahe did; it was a lot bigger and a lot further away from the monastery. Xiahe was great like that; the shopping was also better there. After resting a while, Kat and I took off around the town to find something to eat. And, like always, we came across some western restaurants. The “Tibetan Café” which I’m sure had Tibetan food, and Chinese food for that matter, but as always, we ordered American. A healthy breakfast of friend bananas and hot chocolate with brandy (never to early to start drinking, lol). Ohhh, creepy occurrence happened there that morning. The hot chocolate came out in cups with the star zodiac signs on them (as opposed to the Chinese zodiac) and Kat and I both got our zodiac signs!!! Weird. So weird. Also weird? We were sitting there and I looked out the window and what was outside? A monkey. Yea. Sad though, we saw later that it was chained up. The café was also a hostel, like a lot of them are. It wasn’t the only one there either; there were a ton of western places (those little cafes that you find all over China) and hostels. The place must be crawling with tourists during the summer.

We met back up with TBC and headed to the grasslands for some horseracing. As always, put on for the pleasure of tourists, but that didn’t mean that the whole town didn’t come out to watch. Oh man, and the bus ride there? Freaked the new kids out really bad. Racing around corners at 50mph with a cliff on one side? Easy, there was so much worse on the Silk Road, but they still complained the whole trip. We passed a mastiff breeding place on the way there, it made me think of Tsebho who also raises mastiffs, I was just excited that I was going to get to see them again. The grasslands were amazing. Huge, but they looked so small compared to the mountains surrounding us. It’s amazing to go somewhere that actually looks like all the pictures you’ve seen. All the locals where dressed in their normal clothing, which was traditional Tibetan clothing and all the horses were dressed up with ribbons and bells. Oh man, there was even a yak there. Purely for picture taking, but I love yaks, they are adorable.
After a couple of races there was another competition that involved laying white scarves in the ground in a line (all parallel to each other) and the people, on their horses, would bend over and pick them up while the horse was running. They seriously sat on the side of their horses! Intense. It was fun to watch since it wasn’t nearly as cold there as they told us it would be. It was warmer than Beijing!

We went back to the hotel and had to sit through a painfully long lecture on Buddhism that contained absolutely nothing I didn’t already know. That would have been a perfect thing to skip. They took us to dinner afterwards at, get this, a ridiculously touristy place (for a change…). The veggie dishes were good (since I’m vegetarian and couldn’t eat the yak) but from what I heard, the yak wasn’t great. Which is a shame, I don’t know if they ever got to eat really good yak, they probably would have liked it. After dinner they made TBC kids go up and sing (which will also be another trend of the vacation). It was hilarious. It amazes me that all these cultures can have so many songs that they know by heart that most Chinese people know, regardless of what minority they are from, and we don’t have a single song that people know all the words too.

I wrote a lot about Tibet, and we were there for 3 days so I’m going to break it up. This was just day one of Zhongdian. Next 2 days include the mini Potala palace, an orphanage, a temple and making prayer flags, and hanging out with Gunpo and Tsebho.

Yunnan Trip, Kunming

2006-02-11T07:57:14Z

Alright, so, time to get behind again :P Yunnan trip. It’s this semesters equivialent to the Silk Road trip of last semester. A two week “academic trip” at the beginning of the semester. I guess I’m a little biased, but I think Silk Road was a better trip. But, whatever, this one was much easier and laid back. I enjoyed roughing it though. I guess it also is because west china is so sparsely populated and less civilization. South China is…regular I guess. Much more touristy. But hell, with the frigid cold of Beijing, I didn’t mind going down to the sub-tropics.

Anyway, first stop, Kunming 昆明

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The weather was such a treat. I’ll be going on about it a lot. Beijing is freezing and our first stop it was 70 degrees when we got off the plane. Flowers everywhere, palm trees, everything green. Beautiful. The weather and the plants reminded me a lot of California. It was gorgeous.
First night we had off, or rather, the old students took the night off :P We found a western restaurant that was fantastic. A very chill, indie type place. Had wonderful burritos (vegetable since I’ve turned vegetarian). Start of another trend on this trip. I haven’t had so much western food in such a short period of time in AGES (other than winter break back in the states). We visited this place the entire time we were in Kunming. Every city we visited after one night there would be one restaurant that everybody in the group would end up going to. I think we gave them all more business in 2 days than they would get in a month. This place was called Salvador’s. Tucked in a little back alley, good burritos, like I said, and they had this dessert called “Star Destroyer”. Oh my god. Delicious, brownie and ice cream. Yum.

Enough about the food. This town was really cool. There were tons of trees lining the streets, major city streets and then off the main streets too. Really gave the city a unique look. I think I have a picture of one of the streets. I was wary about bringing out my camera since I had just gotten my phone stolen on the first night. The city is so different from Beijing, all the cities are. They seem more compact for one, but also more advanced. I know Beijing tries not to do that though, preserving history and everything, but it’s nice to get out. Walking up and down the streets around the hotel and the restaurant was so different; small streets, trees, boutique shops lining the streets. Really a different place.

The day we get in we go to this minority culture theme park. It was like Disneyland, a human zoo. It was the beginning of another trend. Tourist trip galore. I felt like such a rich American jerk so often on this trip, people being paid to perform for us and everything. This theme park was ridiculous though. It had all the minorities of Yunnan in little mini minority villages and we actually took a train, universal studios style, around the place. Getting off, having people sing and dance for us and then hoping back on to the next “village”.

Second day in Kunming
Horrible Chinese breakfast. If that didn’t remind me of the Silk Road trip, nothing would. Horrible, disgusting Chinese breakfasts every morning. Ugh.
Headed off to the Stone Forest. Apparantly amazingly famous in this province. To Yunnan what the Great Wall is to China (so they said). The weather was pretty gross this day, but it got a little better. Freezing and no one was expecting it. Anyway, this place was awesome. Limestone…pillars really, as far as the eye could see. It really felt like a stone forest to walk through. Very touristy place though, there were tons of people. The place was huge though, you could go off on one of the winding paths in between all the rocks and completely lose sight of everyone and all the noises. Relaxing once you got away from all the tourists. It was a really cool place. Some parts felt like caves but with holes in the ceilings. Vines and small trees in little courtyards made by the rocks. Once I lost all the people, it was really enjoyable.
I had gotten separated from the group and without a cell phone, I had no clock so I headed back. Early, oh well.

I headed out on my own once we got back to the hotel; I didn’t want to get taken around by a host student TBC provided for us. Down the street was a park, so I headed in that direction. The first area when I first got there was FILLED with people; vendors, performers, visitors, and tons of seagulls (apparently a main attraction at the park). I grabbed some cotton candy (1元 how could a resist?) and started walking around. The park was HUGE, situated around a giant lake that you could cross by bridges and islands. The people disappeared after that first area, so it was a lot better. I walked around for hours, in front of a building there was a little band playing traditional Chinese music and one lady dancing in front of them. Not much of a crowd around them. I stayed for a little bit, but moved on. There were a couple other groups in the park playing music, just for fun, no one around, in little remote areas of the park. It was fantastic. I eventually came back to that first group on my way out. It had grown considerably. There was a much larger crowd and now had about 10 or 15 women dancing and the occasional man. I was surprised that they could all do the dances. I figured out that there was always a leader and they had a certain set of moves I guess, but the leader decided what to do and everyone else followed.
I stayed and watched for a while and all of a sudden heard someone walking up say “We should request Free Bird” *sigh* Only an American would say something like that. I turn around and it’s a group of my friends (old kids from last semester). Kind of weird running into people like that, but it happens, we all stay in a general area. We searched around looking for a place that was playing the Australian open (don’t ask…) but no luck. No TVs in this city apparently.
Went back to the western place for dinner.

Heading off to Shangri-la next!

Sichuan

2006-01-15T11:49:13Z

Ok, last trip from last semester! About time right? Sorry, I’m just well, lazy and good at procrastinating. So here is my Sichuan trip!

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December 1st Veronica and I left for Sichuan, the goal of which was to hold pandas. Veronica had a Tibetan friend that arranged most of the trip for us and met us down there, stayed with us the entire weekend actually. It was great to have him around.
We stayed in a Tibetan area of town in Chengdu, which was fantastic! I love Tibetan culture and there were so many stores and restaurants and of course we spent the whole weekend with a group of Tibetans. It was really interesting to here about his life growing up on the Tibetan grasslands, riding horses, raising yaks, some traditions, etc. Him and some other people he lived near walked across the Himalayas to study in India…walked (it’s illegal, obviously). How crazy is that? Crazy Tibetans. Hard core. Makes life in America seem so uninteresting and easy. I would love to go to Tibet and live like that, if only for a little while. It seems amazing. He really painted an amazing picture of Tibetan life in my mind.
First whole day there and we went straight to the Woolong Panda Reserve place :) :) AWESOME! I’ll try and contain myself, I’m slightly obsessed with pandas…Anyway, the exhibits on their own were pretty great (especially for China). They had quite a big area and so close! Just a little concrete wall separating you from the pandas, short enough to look over. The red panda exhibit let you get even closer. You could seriously almost touch them. I don’t know how they kept them in the areas actually, there was just a little trough keeping them in, nothing they couldn’t jump over really. Definitely could have touched one there if you really wanted to risk it. We weren’t planning on it, but we bargained (well, Gunpo did, our Tibetan friend) and we got to hold the little red pandas for pictures for only RMB40! Which is what? $5? It was seriously the cutest thing ever. It almost competes with pandas…. almost.
We killed some time before holding the pandas by buying souvenirs. Anyone who shops in China knows how stressful this is and how long it takes, lol. Anyway, then we headed over to the panda place paid $100 (US dollars) and HELD A PANDA! Well, sat next to it and hugged it, which is perfectly fine with me. It was about a year old definitely still a small panda. SO cute. Dream come true really. One thing less on my list of things to do before I die that I never thought I would do. It was fantastic. I love pandas. A lot.
There was also a mom and a tiny little baby there (you could see them through glass). It was really adorable; I could have watched that all day.
That night…oh where do I begin? After dinner (the hotpot there is disgusting) we met up with Gunpo’s cousin (Tsebho) and a big group of their Tibetan friends. Went out to a small bar and just hung out. This is where is began. Veronica and I fell in love with Tsebho, lol. He was quite attractive and smart, etc. I won’t bore you, lol. He was pretty amazing though, perfect English, he even wanted to be an English writer at one point in his life. He breeds Tibetan mastiffs, said he would give us some puppies if we ever really want one. The traditional Tibetan jacket just added to it ;) We were totally hopeless after that. It was a fun night.
Almost bought a tiny little puppy for RMB10 (about $1). I’m sure it would have died, but I could have given it a happy last couple of days. We called a travel agency though and they said that you couldn’t bring dogs on planes, so I wouldn’t have been able to get it back to Beijing if it lasted that long. Made me really sad.
We moved our trip to Leshan to the next day since we got a late start. Headed into town to look around. Visited a Taoist temple, which was interesting since Veronica and I have only seen Buddhist temples. It was interesting to see the differences, and it was a pretty place, but I’m still partial to Buddhist temples.
We had some time to kill at night and nothing to do so we decided to see a movie. Harry Potter was the only one playing with English but it wasn’t at a good time and we had just seen it in Beijing. We decided to see a Chinese movie instead, no subtitles or anything. It’s called “Perhaps Love” and I have since become completely addicted to it. It was a musical, fantastic music! Kind of Moulin Rouge-esque, but a lot different. Such a good movie, I can’t even explain. I watch it so much and I never really understand what’s going on, lol. I bought the DVD and soundtrack right when I got back to Beijing.
The next day we went to Leshan to see the GIANT Buddha. Biggest outdoor sitting Buddha in the entire world (well, since the one in Afghanistan was destroyed). Gunpo, Tsebho and all their friends came with us. That must have been quite a sight; two white girls surrounded by a huge group of Tibetans. The area was surrounded by a beautiful forest and caves with a bunch of carvings in them. The prices to get in were pretty steep, but how could we not pay them? It was great, I love Buddhist places. We met a Canadian woman on the way there and she stayed around us for a while. English speakers tend to stick together. Veronica and I showed off our Buddhist knowledge we picked up in class and just from being in China.
Anyway, hard to say anything about the main Buddha except that it was ridiculously HUGE. At the bottom there were all these Chinese tourists taking perspective shots to make it look like they were holding the head or something. Veronica got dragged into it by some random Chinese dude.
We went back to Chengdu for a Tibetan meal and headed for the airport to catch our flight….only to find that Veronica had misread it by an hour and we missed our plane. We got everything settled and the next flight was the next morning. Good times though…
On the way to the airport we told Gunpo that we were in love with his cousin. Gunpo decided that we should tell that to Tsebho so he called him up and well…we did. We didn’t care, we were leaving right? So we told him we were waiting for him to ask us to run away with him to Tibet and he never did. …Then we missed our plane. Slightly awkward after that since we hung out with him that night at some bars. The first place we went to (with just Gunpo, Tsebho hadn’t met up with us yet) was this really lush looking club with a live band (really good actually! I was surprised.). We left to find a different place to go and ended up in a really chill, laid back kind of place. One of those coffee house/bar vibes. Tsebho met us there. Thankfully he did a good job making it not awkward about us confessing our love to him, lol. He kept calling us his ‘wives’, which produced much giggling from Veronica and I. We asked for some Tibetan names and he ‘of course’ gave us his family name :P

Missing our plane definitely worked out, that last night was fun. The whole vacation was fun. I had a great time. It was quite liberating to travel without TBC. Tons of fun. Yup.

~Nikki

Oh, and I forgot to put up the pictures on the last post for the Badaling Wildlife Reserve, so here they are...
Pictures

Buddhism, and Art field trips and Badaling Wildlife Reserve

2006-01-12T05:09:10Z

Buddhism Monastery, Forbidden City and Art gallery, and the Wildlife Reserve

I'm doing some catching up before Yunnan next week. Just have to put up Sichuan then I am done with last semester.
I'm back in Beijing by the way, classes just started today and we are leaving next Friday for a 2 week trip to Yunnan. It's weird having a whole group of different people here, but I guess you get used to it after a while.

Forbidden City sprucing up for the Olympics

Buddhist Monastery

Pictures

Instead of having a week of Buddhism class we went out on a field trip over a weekend. The class got a bus and went up to a monastery somewhere north of Beijing. White Horse Temple maybe? About a 5 hour drive. We got to walk around for a while, participate in their evening chant, and then ate in the cafeteria. The food was terrible, lol. We had to eat it all, one girl (freakishly skinny, so it didn’t surprise me) wouldn’t eat her food and they wouldn’t let her leave, some people had to stay behind and eat it for her. Waste not…
We were going to stay the night in some hotel/dorms that they had but it was ridiculously cold there, north of Beijing, so colder than Beijing. It was kind of miserable so we convinced our teacher to head back to the school, no matter how late we got back. We went to a meditation session and then headed back to Beijing.
We hit fog on the way back. Really intense fog. It took us over 8 hours to get back, we didn’t arrive at the school until 3am. Insanity. I guess a lot of people where playing truth or dare on the bus and getting embarrassingly drunk (I’m sure the teacher loved that, no matter how cool he is, these kids were being idiots) but I just turned on my MP3 player and pretended to sleep (and sleep) for most of it so that they wouldn’t bother me.

Art Field Trip

More Pictures

Yes, I went on a lot of field trips towards the end of the year. This one wasn’t too special. We met at the Forbidden City and looked around, went into the museums that people always miss. It was interesting though. First time I thought that it was a little overrated. Too much of a tourist spot (like those stupid Terracotta Warriors) but it’s actually HUGE. People only go down the center and see the main palace part of it (with the throwns and whatnot). People never head to the side ‘wings’. Maybe they don’t know you are allowed down there (it’s so empty) or maybe they just don’t know about it. The Forbidden City is actually gigantic. Totally HUGE and a lot of people never really know that (well, maybe they do, but they never get to see how big it really it). It was nice to see some new areas. Very interesting place.
After the Palace Museum we walked (quite far) to the Beijing art museum. We had a expensive duck lunch on the way there, yay for TBC paying for things. Anyway, I really enjoyed the art museum, would probably have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been so tired from waking up so ridiculously early. I love art galleries though. They were even having an opening of an exhibit!! That was fun to walk through. HUGE exhibit. Nice, I kind of want to go back sometime, but I’m sure there are tons of art galleries in Beijing.

Badaling Wildlife Reserve
Pictures
I’m going to skip Sichuan and leave it till the end because it’ll take a little longer. Getting some of the shorter ones done with first.

So, randomly one night I ran into some people and they invited me to go to the Badaling Wildlife Reserve with them the next morning. EARLY. Blah. Anyway, why the hell not, right? It was one of those places that is like a safari and the animals can come right up to you. Here you didn’t take your own car though, there were bus tours. The coolest part was that we were the only people that were there the WHOLE day!! We got the entire bus to ourselves.
The number of animals that they had was REALLY impressive! Bunches of tigers, regular and white, TONS of lions, packs of wolves, bears, damn, just about everything. I didn’t get too many pictures, I was counting on other people taking them. Which they did, but I didn’t get around to getting.
The best part, by far, were the BABY lions and tigers! Cages and cages of them! Which wasn’t surprising since there were so many of the adults running around. So cute though. There was one cage with really little baby lions. Just look at the pictures, they were adorable.
We went up to look at the monkeys that were there, in the stupidest cage I could ever imagine monkeys being in since they could just jump over the side of it. Stupid. Anyway, the gate to the monkey area was unlocked, so we decided to go in. Scary stuff, those monkeys just LOOK mean. And they would hiss at you if you got too close. Anyway…we left after that, lol. Got some good pictures when I was actually taking pictures.

Fragrant Hills and Horseback riding!

2005-12-29T04:02:44Z

I found a new photo place, MUCH better than the one I'm using now, so after this update it'll be from there. I think it's better. Wish I wasn't lazy and would transfer all my pics onto there...but yea. Anyway, these are both short, quite a few short ones coming up, but enjoy!

Fragrant Hills

More Pictures

We went on a little trip after class one day to Xiangshan Park (Fragrant Hill). It is famous for being beautiful during fall when the leaves are changing. We unfortunately got there too late in the season to see anything but the Ginko trees in color. Everything else was already fallen. It was still an obviously beautiful park. HUGE too, I’m definitely going back in the spring.
We took a cable car up to the top of the mountain and got to watch the sun set into the ~~hills~~ pollution. There was also a group of kung fu people up at the top about to practice as the sun was going down. Which is bad that we saw that because that means the sun had set. We were up on the top of a mountain in the dark and we had to walk down hundreds of stairs to get back to the bottom. Which wouldn’t have been a problem, but it’s China, so obviously the stairs suck and there isn’t a SINGLE light on the way down. It was the scariest thing ever. After a while off looking at your feet the stairs in front of you start to blend into each other because they are all the same color and there aren’t any shadows. Fun. Best thing in the world once we got to the bottom.

Horseback Riding :: Kangxi Grasslands

More Pictures!

Not much to say about this outing. Veronica and I went out for a little weekend horseback riding. It was a pretty sweet deal, approx 400RMB for a private car, lunch, and 4 hours of horseback riding! Only 100RMB for the 2 extra hours and a private car. Fantastic.
The ride out to the Kangxi Grasslands (north of Beijing) was fantastic. It was the first time I had been in that direction outside of Beijing. I haven’t actually been to the Badaling section of the Great Wall (very touristy) but you had to drive through that to get to the grasslands. It was so awesome seeing the wall snaking through the uninhabited mountains around the city. It was a relatively clear day so you could see it pretty far off, and even when you thought you had passed it, you could look out and see another piece of it. I love China, sometimes things like this just seem so common place. That’s when you know you are really living the life.
The horses were a different story. I had an ok one, but Veronica had some bad luck. The first horse she had REALLY didn’t want to leave the stable area. And when it did we had a little colt following us. Which was definitely amusing and cute, but the horse was a pain in the ass. After a while she went to try and trade it in and they gave her a horse that tried to throw her off! They knew it was a bad horse too, just like they knew the other one didn’t want to go anywhere. She ended up getting the first horse back and we paid for a ‘guide’ to follow us and keep the horse in line.
It was a desert/grassland, but it was still really pretty. The mountains did fade away into the pollution not too far away but it was a very relaxing atmosphere, even had some lakes. Just open area to take your horse and run.
Check riding horses in the Kangxi Grasslands off my list.

Guilin/Longshen

2005-12-20T22:40:08Z

Long time with no update! I thought I would wait until I was in the states for Christmas with a faster internet connection before I tried to catch up. I can't believe I haven't even finished my Guilin trip yet!!! Well, here it is, the last section of Guilin…short and sweet

More Pictures here!

We headed over to a small village that is famous for the 'rice terrace fields'. They were pretty stunning but the weather was total shit while we were there. The whole place, the whole area is connected by paths and stairs that were nothing more than big stones. Not ever flattened, just rocks. Slipperiest rocks you could ever imagine! Slippery rocks of death as I like to call them. After what happened to Raza on the Silk Road trip I'm surprised they chanced this quite actually. I'm surprised no one got hurt.
On the first day a few of us decided to stop early on the hike, it was raining (still) and really, you could only see so many rice fields. We headed back to the 'hotels'. We stopped on the way, someone wanted to get a picture of an old woman who was selling things on the path. We chilled there for a while eating sweet potatoes. The rest of the evening consisted mainly of drinking mijiu, a fantastically sweet wine made out of rice. Some of us skipping the party planned for that night, it was in the town below us (Read: Going down those slippery rocks of death in the MIDDLE of the night) and we didn't want to die. We hung out with the owner of the place and talked to him for a while. Turned rock-paper-scissors into a drinking game. That was our night pretty much.

The next day some of us woke up early to go on a hike to a different village near by. The hike was beautiful and not as hard of a walk as the day before, and not as wet either. We got to the village and went up to the school and got to play with the kids during their recess. Tons of fun :) Those kids were adorable!

After that we were on a bus for a while and ended the trip with A RESORT. Hotsprings :) SO fantastic. Best way to end a vacation too. We got massages, chilled in the hot tubs and drank for the entire rest of the day and night. It was so relaxing and so much fun to just chill with people.

I loved this trip, all in all. It was nice to just be able to do things and not have an 'educational' experience like the Silk Road. Not that it wasn't interesting, but it would have been better without things like those speeches to sit through and the boring museums and whatnot. Fun trip. I love China.

Guilin Trip Second Post

2005-11-28T10:14:41Z

Guilin Part 2

More pictures

Cooking lessons! We could sign up for different options. 3 options, only two days. First one we chose was cooking and bamboo rafting. There were about 12 of us I guess? We started out going to this rural little village for cooking. Which, once again, is fabulous since we cooked chicken (which they gave us raw at first, obviously) in a rural village in South China. We went into a shed in this village that had some pretty nice (portable) cooking equipment. Apparently the people in the village didn't use it because they weren't used to it. Anyway, so we got some recipes and we had a chef there that taught us how to cook! It was awesome, I'm just glad that know I'll be able to cook some of these things back home. That'll be fun.
After that (which took a long time) we went back to the Li River and got to float down the river on bamboo rafts! They had two lounge chairs on them and someone in back of you pushing you along. It was so relaxing. There were even rafts on the river of people selling beer, lol. Fun times. Alex and I had a great time chilling on the raft. It was a pretty long ride. I'm glad Alex is staying for the full year; we had a lot of fun. Probably one of the best days on the trip, just so relaxing (with the exception of the resort). It was quite an experience. Would you ever have pictured yourself floating down a river on a bamboo raft and looking out seeing that landscape? These vacations blow my mind like that. Everything we do is something I never would have thought I would have the chance to do.

Got back into town and (after eating more western food) headed off to a show. Only about 5 of us went since we had to pay extra, but like I always say on these trips, never do anything because you don't want to spend money or you want to sleep in. So we go. It was called 'Impressions' or something and was a show on the river It's impossible to explain. Well, it was put on by some really famous director (Crouching Tiger guy). The mountains in the background were all lit up for part of it, which is damn impressive. Those mountains are huge. That may be one of the only pictures that actually came out. The whole show was actually on the water. At the beginning some people in boats stretched out across the entire river with red ribbon/pieces of fabric (huge) and moved them to look like waves and using them to pull themselves and their boats across the river. I tried to get videos of this, but they didn't really turn out. But who knows, they might give you an idea. Check at the bottom, if I can actually get them uploaded.
At the end of the show this woman came out on a giant moon and all the boats around it (since it was pitch black) and little lights on them that made it look like stars. Amazing effect. The moon sort of turned out in a picture I got too. At the very end all these people (hundreds I imagine) came out on platforms that magically appeared on the water (they just swung out, but you couldn't see them, it looked like they were walking on the water) crisscrossing the whole river. It was PITCH black and all you saw where little lights that they had all over their costumes. Really neat effect. They even started…blinking their costumes. Fantastic. They eventually turned the lights on them, so you could actually see them in their costumes. So awesome. Totally worth the money.

The last day in Yangshuo I did bike riding with a few other people. Christian, Alex (again), Tim, and Kat. I'm glad it was a small group, that's always more fun. So, here's how the day went. Rented some mountain bikes and had some intense riding for about an hour (ouch) to this mountain, Moon Hill. Hurt so much to climb that thing. We didn't even get a break and our legs were killing us. But we went all the way to the top. Another thing that was totally worth it. Killer view. You come up on the other side of the mountain and the hill has a huge hole that eroded through it. Gives a perfect frame for the hills in the background (fading into the mist, as they always are). We climbed further up to above the hole, off the path. Not as nice, there was an antenna up there, which kind of ruined it, but pretty neat. Is it strange that every time I go up on a mountain like that I just want to jump off of it? Damn, I want to go hand gliding so bad.

After that we had to bike to the caves. My legs were screaming bloody murder. It was painful. Had to go on a dirt path through another rural village to get to the caves. On the way out there was this run down house that you could hear loud techno music coming from. Which was odd. Ugh, and worst sight I've ever seen in my life. While biking to the caves I saw a motorbike going the other direction with crates of dogs on the back. Barking. About to go into somebody's dog meat hot pot. Sick. So sick. That sight will never leave my memory. It was totally scarring.
Anyway. Got to the caves. Talk about liability. There are so many of these things that you would never be allowed to do without signing your life away on contracts. We had to switch shoes into ones that didn't fit well and walk through this little cave. These tunnels were ridiculously small. I don't know how Christian made it, he's so tall. He looked very uncomfortable for most of it. And then we came to it. The mud pit Jump in guys. It was so much more fun than I thought it would be. Throwing mud, fighting, floating, and sliding. Awesome. Got some pictures taken…which I still need to get from Alex.
We walked out of the caves, a different way we came, with no guide and totally covered in mud (slippery as all hell, usually with just a rope to hold us up). We came out on the OTHER side of the mountain. We had no idea where we were. It was kind of scary. Once again though, great scenery. First looking out of the cave. The tunnels were small, but this entrance was HUGE and the plants worked their way into the mouth of the cave. And then when you get out you are in the middle of this random farmland. Really pretty farm land…but yea. Farmland. Walking around covered in mud.
Once we got back to the front of the mountain we had to totally wash off under a waterfall of FREEZING water. After that you get to play and jump in a pool of freezing water. Which is actually really fun.
Christian, Tim and I stopped at some random park on the way back to look at a…big tree. Totally forgot the name of it. But it was pretty impressive. The place was touristy though. You could pose with monkeys if you wanted to.
Christian and I grabbed dinner when we got back into town before anything else. Totally starving. The rest of the group (that we split from at the very beginning of the trip) was in town, so we spent all night hanging out with all of them. You can guess how the rest of the night went. I went to sleep early though, I was exhausted.

Next post is the last one for Guilin, the village and the spa.
You know, I don't think I'll ever be caught up in this stupid journal.

~Nikki

Guilin Trip! First post

2005-11-21T15:26:39Z

Guilin Trip
First stop : Guilin

More Guilin Pictures

This trip has converted me. Converted me from what, I have no idea, but I LOVE the south! These limestone mountains make for some fantastic scenery! 真他妈的漂亮。The part of the city we had the hotel in was on the edge I guess, but the view from out room looked out into mountains instead of city, so no complaining here.
First stop where the Reed Flute Caves, which, you guessed it, big caves. Huge caves, but probably nothing special from other huge caves that other people have seen EXCEPT for the neon lights. The whole cave was lit up with brightly coloured lights. Made it all seem a little contrived and touristy, but it actually was kind of cool. Fantasy, fairyland kind of thing. And of course it reinforces my belief that China is a big communist Disneyland. Some poor girl had a panic attack in it because she was claustrophobic. When we finally left Christian and I stopped from some sugarcane juice. Sugarcane is HUGE here, they sell it everywhere. It's pretty popular to just by a giant stick of it and gnaw on the end. Slightly odd, but good. Anyway, the week before I had gone to see a taping of a Chinese game show that Christian was on because it was about Brazil or something and one of the clips had sugarcane juice in it and he said it made him homesick, so they had some here! So we bought some. Ridiculously sweet, but apparently not as good as in Brazil. He may be a little biased.

Anyway, the part of the city we spent the night in, other than having a fantastic view was also next to this fabulous shopping area. Which is good and bad. It reminded me a lot of Promenade Street in Santa Monica from the beginning of the year (god, that seems like a long time ago) with the big street with lights around it and shops lining it. This place was gigantic though, it seriously went on forever. And when you would come to an intersection area, it would stretch in all directions with the same shopping area. Joe and I went a little crazy with sweets and ice cream and then we just walked around buying souvenirs. Good place to do it. Pretty cheap. Nothing really special for the area, but that didn't really stop anyone from buying things. We walked around trying to find some friends that split off from us and they had made friends with this guy whose sister owned a teashop and they were drinking some free tea. We joined, and bought some tea and then the guy showed us to his art gallery. He's a teacher at a school near buy (yea right). Nice stuff though. They had some really beautiful oil paintings, but they were too expensive for my blood.

Next day we split the group up and my group headed to Yangshuo. I loved this town. It was the touristiest spot I've seen, but you know when there are tourists there is western food and lots of shit to buy. Which is exactly what we all spent our time doing. Every minute of free time was either spent eating at the dozens of western restaurants (seriously lined the street) or shopping at the dozens and dozens of shops and vendors. The city was mostly just one street and, lucky us, our hotel was on that street. The city was very European; all the hotels were bars on the bottom floors and hotel-like hostel areas above it. Pub kind of atmosphere. The hundreds of stupid westerners made bargaining kind of hard, but I still came away with a lot of good deals and an empty wallet.
Oh, story time about stupid westerners. My friend was getting money out of an ATM and a couple of Americans came up behind him and they started talking. The guy, who had been in China for about 4 months said 'Wow, I've spent so much money in this town. I spent [insert exorbitant amount of money here] on [insert something not worth it here]'
My friend: 'You know you can bargain, right?'
Guy: 'You can bargain here? I thought they were set prices'
*bangs head on desk* That just amazes me. Even set prices are negotiable and you would NEVER think that things in these kinds of stores are set prices. He must be spending a fortune here. In towns like this, you take the price offered and usually cut it ¼-1/8 (because it's so touristy, usually it's ½- ¼ the price). Those people got bamboozled *giggles*

Anyway, once we checked into the hotel, we headed to the Li River and took a boat to a fishing village. The boat ride was a lot of fun; first good look at some of the beautiful scenery. The river (big attraction in this area), the fantastic tall spire mountains (hard to explain, look at the pictures, or imagine those old Chinese paintings that have the mountains that go straight up). So we took a boat to the village, took about half an hour, got to ride with our feet in the water and take pictures. Quite relaxing. Watch the water buffalo chilling in the river. Whatever. Anyway, this little village, kind of like a human zoo, but whatever. They were happy because Clinton had been there. And people here LOVE Clinton. Anyway, main attraction was all the chickens and birds. First little glimpse of why South China is a breeding ground of bird flu.
Got back and had a burrito. *drools* I'm craving some real Mexican now.
River Fishing Show after we got back to the town. Get this; We follow this boat with the fisherman in it in boats of our own. The fishing…ok, so he has all these birds that he just throws into the water, he goes around, the birds follow swimming under water catching fish. Their necks are tied so they can't swallow big fish. When the fisherman sees they caught one, he yanks them up and practically strangles them until they spit the fish out. How gross is that? I didn't eat any fish on this trip. Oh, and then *coughcoughBIRDFLU* we get out on the shore and he grabs some of the birds and puts them on people (see pics). Some of us where like, wtf? And stayed far away. Hurray for bird flu.

Had some apple crisp (yum) and went to a techno club on one of the back streets. Random, I know, but they pulled us in with California Dreamin'.

More pictures here

Want to split up this trip so it isn't too long. This is the first few days. Still to come: Cooking lessons, bamboo rafting, mud baths, slippery stones of death, and a resort.

~Nikki

My webhost is being ridiculously obnoxious. Sorry for those little marks up in the corner...until I get the other one fixed...What I wouldn't kill to be able to get onto my tripod which I'm PAYING FOR and CAN'T USE. China *shakes head*

Great Wall Trip :: Qinhuangdao

2005-11-15T12:13:37Z

Qinhuangdao

More Pictures

Went to Hebei Province a few weeks ago, the 22nd and 23rd of October. Last enough for it to be cold, but more on that later. We took an optional 'field trip' (for 300RMB) to the coast (just east of Beijing) to see part of the Great Wall. On the way to the train station on Saturday we drove by a park in Beijing that had what looked like part of the old city wall in it. It was actually a really gorgeous park and I have no idea where it was and haven't seen it since. It would be nice to find it though, once it gets warmer. Anyway, this trip was amazingly bad timing, right before finals week. The train ride (about 3 hours) gave us some good studying time though. Except the way there I tried to sleep. I blame the Brazilian Salsa party the night before. IMPOSSIBLE to sleep on the train though, it was absolutely freezing on the train. They didn't turn the heat on till the last hour -_-
Anyway, after waking up at 5am and having a 3 hours train ride followed by an hour bus ride, we get to part of the Great Wall. Not the part by the ocean, but a different part that you could actually climb. Well, had to climb. It was ridiculously steep and the stairs where really high. Which made it much harder than Simatai. Some of the steps here were 2 feet high! It was quite a workout on your thighs, let me tell you.
The view wasn't terribly impressive, not like the Simatai part (which is known for being beautiful). You look away from the mountain you are climbing and it's just ugly civilization. Farms, factories, and the climb puts you directly eye level with the gross pollution, which is nearly impossible to escape from. This is what happens when you burn that much coal, China.
Anyway, we climbed all the way up the wall and then it was bricked off saying that the rest wasn't as developed! Like that would stop us. We climbed over that wall (well, to the side actually, which was probably worse since it was a 20 foot drop to the rocky ground below you) and kept on going. Definitely not restored as much. The stairs had crumbled away in places. The whole thing probably wasn't safe (and Miranda, one of our faculty people was yelling at us to stop and when she knew we weren't listening to not die and that she loved us, haha. She's so cute) but that's half the fun. Had some fun rock climbing over the parts that well, weren't there. Had to be very careful with the loose rocks. If you fell? You would just keep going.
After the top of that part, towards the crest of the hill, was another sign saying not to go further (guess they knew you wouldn't listen the first time) except this time there was a fence with barbed wire. Thing is, the fence wasn't very long, you could go around it, and it was really high off the ground, so you could go under it. Which we did. Now this is the real wall. Totally unrestored. So, if you want to know what the wall looks like now without restoration, here it is, a rock path. Check out my pictures if you need to. You can tell it was a wall, but there is practically nothing left. We realized that we were heading west, which meant the wall would never end, so we turned back and went down.

Beach part of the wall next. Terribly disappointing in my opinion. Like most things in China, it had an uncanny resemblance to Disneyland. I won't go into my theory of China being a big Disneyland. Well…big, failed communism Disneyland. Anyway, it was still neat to see the wall, even if it was touristy, just for the novelty of saying that I've seen both ends of the Great Wall and two sides of the Pacific Ocean. We had a lot of free time here, more than anyone really needed, so we all spent time wandering by ourselves on the beach and chilling on the rocks. It was really cold though.
They dropped us downtown afterwards for some food, which was very rare on this trip (the food part). We ended up going to KFC. Yay for westernization. They played techno on the bus to the hotel. I don't know why, but this is a key memory of the trip :P

This hotel was seriously MIDDLE of NOWHERE. Not only that, but we got there at 6:30, and being surrounded by nothing, there was a lot of time to kill doing nothing. Study a little Chinese and watch a little TV that we can't actually understand and then sleep. Sweet sleep. No heat at all. Very cold. Woke up early with time to kill, so we headed to a little section of beach that was close by and ran into Theresa on the way (classmate). So we all chilled at the beach, practiced Chinese (can't even get away from it on vacations), whatever. THEN these creepy Chinese guys showed up, 3 of them, and started talking with us. It didn't start out creepy, they were wondering if we wanted to buy a crab from them or something. But then they just kept talking, asking us about where we studied, how old we were, etc etc. They started getting really creepy, Theresa looks Asian, Vietnamese American I think? Anyway, that's always trouble; you get harassed a lot more when you look Asian. They started playing with her jacket (which was on her) and touching her hair. I made up an excuse that we had to get to the train station and we bolted. They followed us on their motorbikes and tried to give us a ride to the train station. We are totally not that stupid. We made excuses, ditched them, and ran back to the hotel a little freaked out.
Got some good seashells though. Don't know how I'm going to get those back, but they are neat!

End of story. Nice little weekend get-away.

~Nikki

I would like it to be known...

2005-11-14T08:16:44Z

that I have tasted perfection, a glimpse of nirvana, call it what you will. I just had the most fabulous hard-core-chinese-medicine-open-you-meridians blind massage. When looking for the place, it's kind of shady. A maze through apartment buildings, but it was WONDERFUL. I recommend one for everyone, know matter what the cost. Find yourself a blind masseuse.
If anyone is ever in the Chaoyang District of Beijing, let me know and I'll give you directions to a wonderful place. Best 50元ever spent. What is that? $6? I love this country.

I needed that so badly, after horseback riding? Ouch. I edited all my pictures; the coast, Guilin, and horseback riding, so get ready for some updates soon.

~Nikki

Change maybe?

2005-11-08T11:51:39Z

Thought I would start to use this journal more, still about China, but a bit more than just my excursions out of Beijing. Hope no one minds :P I still haven't updated with my trip to the coast or down to Guilin (South China! Avian Flu baby!) last week, but with finals and then getting back into school (LOTS of homework) I've been a little busy. Anyway, here are a few news articles I found today that people are talking about.

First one...lots of talk about this. We haven't really herad it mentioned much in China, even going down to the South, we cooked raw chicken, held birds, etc. Now? All of a sudden they shut down ALL the poultry markets in Beijing. Kind of sudden. Kind of scary. Very annoyed that we won't have chicken for a long time. I hope this doesn't mean that Beijing Duck (北京烤鸭） is going to be gone too!! A group of us are going to get as many chicken skewers as we can. Hopefully they still have a little chicken left. And Billie (我的中国朋友) said the duck probably won't be a problem, but I think it might be. Glad I had some earlier in the week.

Dalai Lama
But a representative responded that he does not seek independence. Instead, the Dalai Lama would like China to grant Tibet greater autonomy and to respect Tibetan culture and religion.

That is a HUGE step. I don't really know how I feel about giving up on Tibet as an independent country (which I would like), but if it has to happen, it would be nice to have the Dalai Lama back. We'll see what China says, but this is pretty big. My buddhism teacher was floored when he heard this. He got SO excited!
Have I mentioned that I love my teacher? Fantastic to hear someone says something about the CCP. Especially since most teachers are card carrying party members. Dennis (Buddhism teacher) was so happy that there is a possiblity of the Dalai Lama coming back to China in the future and said that political systems change. Look at what the government was like when they took Tibet. Communist, right? Now, here's what he said in class, which is amazing. Political systems change, China was communist, but isn't anymore. Communism is providing for the people, free housing, food, etc, and China doesn't do that. Maybe it's only a matter of time before China completely changes. Tibet may be free someday.
I don't know about that. I think one thing that may have changed the Dalai Lama's mind...the railroad. Now that Tibet is connected to China it's going to be near impossible for that to ever happen now. Who knows. Just wanted to talk about how fabulous my teacher was. I get into so many political discussions in this country, usually with other americans, but it's great.

Beijing closes Poultry Markets
And here, just the other day, someone said we wouldn't have to worry about the bird flu in Beijing, they are only killing birds in the south, Beijing is urban enough to not worry about it. Yea right.
I also heard that China will release the actual numbers of bird flu victims ('real numbers' yea right. Take the numbers and times them by 2 and they might be real) and if it's high enough they will send us home. Which would SUCK. Let's hope that's not the case.
Another article at ChinaDaily

Chinese company trying to sell land on the moon

That's it for now.

~Nikki

Pictures still aren't working? I'll work on that some more, I'm busy with work, but the URLs will slowly change.

[EDIT 2005.11.9]
Guess I missed this piece of information while studying for midterms a few weeks ago...

China will shut down borders if struck by bird flu :: Human to human that is. Apparantly there is already one case that is questionable. A girl may have caught it from her grandmother. *shrugs* Guess that would mean that they wouldn't send us home early

Pictures up till now!

2005-10-24T01:30:20Z

I don't know what's going on, but apparantly some people are having problems with the pictures. I tried something else...If it didn't work for you, try this!

12 Albums!

I just got back from Qinhuangdao (the beach and the east end of the Great Wall) so I'll post soon with that :)

~Nikki

Summer Palace

2005-10-19T14:46:29Z

[EDIT] I don't know what's going on with these pics. I guess Kodak photo is messing with their website or something...
[EDIT2 2005/10/23]
I think they were revamping their site. Try using it now and it should work

Click for pics!

People don't lie when they tell you the most beautiful month in Beijing is October. If you ever consider coming here, come during the fall. The weather is perfect. Sunny, 70F, cool at night (cool? Freezing, like, 45F) Beautiful. Anyway. A month and a half into school and TBC finally has one of those 'weekend trips' that they always talked about. Summer Palace Northwest corner of Beijing. Guess what? It was beautiful. Now, the dowager empress's marble boat was slightly overrated, the garden was not. Largest imperial garden in the world and really gorgeous. The Summer Palace is situated so that most of the time it looks like it's on an island. There is a giant lake around most of it and when you are in the main park area and look at it, it looks like it's an island. It's a fantastic sight, to look at it from the park. The 'island' is a hill and you have a view of all the buildings on the backside because they are all at different points on the hill. Hard to explain, and I don't think I even got any good shots of it. But it was nice. I can't even imagine one family having that whole thing. It was enormous and there were SO many different buildings!!
Joe, Kat and I walked around the park for a while (after I begged to cross the bridge to get over there, I was heading towards the stupa *see pics* but we didn't make it that far). They have a scenic path through farmlands? That's what the sign said, maybe we didn't stay on it long enough. It also has a 'bridge' path. The 6-bridge path I think it's called. With…well...bridges. Nice bridges though. Big bridges. It's really an interesting set up. If you are on the bridge path, you have the huge lake with the main palace buildings on one side and on the other side you are separated from the rest of the park by a little lake/river (i.e. what the bridges take you over). So it's a park and then another strip of land. Lots of trees, mostly willows and evergreen, lily ponds, etc. I'm doing badly with descriptions today, aren't I?
Anyway, we didn't see all the bridges, but we saw what I imagine is the best one. A HUGE bridge with a giant oval in the middle. So steep to get to the top, but really pretty looking. Get a good view looking out through the oval. So story time; we go to take pictures of the giant oval bridge from off to the side. I couldn't really get a good shot (willow trees in the way), so I go out onto a concrete thing/pathway that went into the little river the bridge was going over. Pretty much a straight on view through the bridge. And what do I see there? Some guy playing what we later found out was a vertical flute. So I sit and listen, joined by Kat and Joe. Fantastic musician. Turns out the guy is a graduate from Peking University and speaks PERFECT English. He seemed excited that he had such an attentive audience. Not that he was trying to get one. He was under the bridge where no one could see him, just hear the music. He talked to us about Chinese Classical music and how it's getting lost because today's youth doesn't understand it. How it's closely tied to Classic Literature, and then a little talk on the beauty of classic Chinese lit and prose. Followed by talking about English lit and prose….And then reciting SHAKESPEARE. Oh, the random people you meet in random places. Some Chinese man playing a flute under a bridge, speaks perfect English, and can recite Shakespeare. What a character. He was really an artist. Passionate about everything he talked about like you expect people to be when you think of starving artists in a café or something. Fun times.
We were short on time since we came with the group on a bus so we had to run back and leave, but it was a lot of fun. You could wander around there for hours.

Summer Palace Tips:
- the souvenirs there are actually pretty decently priced. Like everywhere, bargain.
- take a whole day to go there. Wander around all the grounds. You don't even have to stay on the paths. We went through a forest area and found a field of flowers and butterflies, and another area that was a huge stretch of clovers (found a 4 leaf clover btw!)
- Climb up to the stupa and tell me what it's like :)
- Like most places, student Ids get you 50% or more off

Next: I'm going to the end of the Great Wall where it goes into the ocean this weekend and then the next weekend and following week I'm going on our Guilin trip in the South of China. ...All if I survive my chinese final of course.