Kaifeng/Luoyang

Part of my program involves taking "excursions" as a group to different cities. The first one we did was Nanjing, and the most recent one was last weekend. We had a choice among 3 excursions, and I chose to go on the Kaifeng/Luoyang one. There was only 11 people on the trip, so it was nice and small and a lot more enjoyable because of that.

The reason we went to Kaifeng and Luoyang is because they are two of the ancient capitals of China. Beijing and Nanjing are the other two we have been to and the others are Xian, Hangzhou and Anjing. Unfortunately I won't have time to go to any of those.

The weekend started off with another overnight train ride on hard sleepers (66 people in one car again). Once again, very little sleeping was done by me. Mainly because of the chorus of snores coming from the 4 men sharing the same compartment. We arrived in Kaifeng early on Friday (we had Friday off of school because it was "sports day" or something like that) and went promptly to check into our hotel. Worst. Hotel. Ever. The floors weren't vacuumed, the bathrooms where dirty, and it was like a refrigerator because they didn't have the heat on an it was about 45 degrees outside. All part of the China experience though! Our first stop in Kaifeng was the Dragon Pavilion which was built by one of the emperors for some reason or another. I apologize for the lack of detail, but it was freezing and raining and I was trying harder to stay warm and dry than I was trying to listen to the tour guide. So all I know is that is really pretty and the emperor used to hold council and other emperor-esque duties there.

After a short rest at the hotel, we headed back out to visit a park that was modeled off of this Song dynasty painting:

It kind of reminded me of Colonial Williamsburg. Unfortunately, the weather had taken a turn for the worse, and it started sleeting on us. So instead of exploring the park more, we popped into a restaurant, warmed up with some tea for an hour or so, ate dinner and then headed back to the hotel to warm up (impossible due to the lack of heating). Thankfully, instead of spending the night cooped up in a hotel room, the teachers that took us on the trip arranged KTV (karaoke) for all of us to go to!

The next morning, a few of us chose to go visit the local Catholic church. This church was built in 1916 and managed to survive the cultural revolution.

The steeple from a distance 

 The free standing bell tower behind the church

The priest, telling us about the founders of the church.

Once we returned from the hotel, it was time to head out for Luoyang. During the 3 hour bus ride to get  Luoyang, I realized that was the first time we actually drove to a city that we where going to be spending an extended period of time in. Every other time we've taken the train. Just another difference between America and China.

Upon arrival in Luoyang, we headed over to the Peony gardens for the annual Peony festival. Apparently Luoyang is the Peony capital of China. Not sure why. But it was pretty!

This band was playing outside the gardens. 

They could stand to learn a little something about tuning. 

Being weird with Hannah, per usual. 

Overview of the garden area.

Luoyang also marked the exacerbation of something that had been happening every where else: people wanting to take pictures with us. They would get our attention by calling “高福帅哥” (tall, rich, handsome) to the guys and “美女” (pretty girl) to the girls (which is funny that they use such respectful terms when we walk around calling our selves 洋鬼子 which means "foreign devil"), and then ask us to take a picture with them. We almost always obliged. It got so bad for me one time that one of the teachers had to act like my agent and usher me away from the area and swat away all the people wanting to take pictures.

The last day of the trip was Sunday which we spent at the Longmen grottoes there in Luoyang. The Longmen grottoes is this area with lots of caves carved into the side of a cliff and inside these caves are stone buddhas carved from the rock. The buddhas where carved there because it was considered a
"holy place" and because if a family could carve a buddha, they believed they would have an easier time of reaching enlightenment. Despite the crushing crowd, it was actually a really cool area.

From across the river (which also happens to

be a tributary of the Yellow river) 

El Grupo

Sunday afternoon we took the high speed train back to Beijing and got back to the dorms at around 9:30pm. All in all, the trip was really fun, despite the rain and chilly weather.

This weekend is Labor Day here in China, so we get next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off of school which means.....more travelling! WOOO! This time we (Hannah, Kate, John and I (pretty much the Qingdao gang minus Eddie because he's going to Hong Kong instead, loser)) are going to Harbin, which is one of the northern most cities in China and is super close to the Russian border. So there is a lot of Russian influence and apparently a lot of Russians living there. Should be fun! I'll tell you all about that when we get back. Good luck to all those back at home taking finals!

The Great Wall, a Confucius Temple and a Trip to the Theater

We finally went to the Great Wall!!!!! I had been waiting for that day for sooo long. On Friday afternoon we headed out to an ancient part of the wall that nobody else ever hikes, so we had that whole part of the wall to ourselves. Not only was the wall really cool, but the scenery was beautiful! The part of the wall we where on was high up on the mountains next to Beijing, so we had a great view of some rocky crags and a few small villages that dotted the countryside. At the same time, it begs the question, why did they build the wall across the top of the mountains in the first place? Aren't the mountains enough of a natural barrier? Oh well, maybe the Huns and Mongols where more advanced than we gave them credit for. And I think the Chinese soldier's legs where exceptionally strong, because climbing that sucker was exhausting. Anyway, the Great Wall was great! Definitely something that I would recommend everyone see if you get the chance.

First view of the wall from the bus

Yep, those are the "stairs" we climbed.

On Saturday, my philosophy class took a trip to a Confucius temple here in Beijing. It was fascinating, partly because our teacher was there to explain stuff to us, but mostly because out teacher brought along a 19 year old british student, who is part of the 79th generation descended from Confucius. Now that was awesome. He was super cool (and pretty cute) and told us lots of neat stuff about Confucius and his family. For example, the Confucian family tree is the longest family tree in history, and his grandfather was tortured during the cultural revolution for being a descendent of Confucius. All in all, it was a really cool experience enhanced by the fact that we got to learn about Confucius straight from one of his descendants.

 James, part of the 79th generation descended 

from Confucius (the person, not the dog)

For the past week or so, every Hanyu (reading and writing) class has been preparing performances for a School of Chinese as a Second Language-wide competition. Each class (by level) has to put on a skit of some sort, and then the judges (who are teachers) choose a winner. I went today (with classes 1-12). Our skit was from the book Journey to the West, which is about a Chinese Buddhist monk who is traveling from China to India accompanied by the "Monkey King" and the adventures they have along the way. Our specific story was The Monkey King Meets the White Bone Demon. Guess who I was. That's right. The White Bone Demon. Before you watch the video below, here's a summary of the story:

Tang Seng (the monk) is traveling with the monkey king and two other companions through the mountains when they decide to take a rest. Monkey King draws a protective circle on the ground and tells the 3 not to leave the circle while he goes to gather food. The white bone demon hears that Tang Seng is in the area and gets excited because if she eats his flesh, then she will live forever. So when Monkey King is gone, the white bone demon turns herself into a beautiful girl to try to lure the monk and his companions out of their circle. But the monkey king returns, sees she is not a real girl and kills her. The white bone demon then turns herself into an old lady who also tries to get her hands on Tang Seng. The monkey king kills her too. Then the demon turns herself into an old man, but the monkey king kills him too. Tang Seng at this point is to mad at the monkey king for killing seemingly innocent people, that he bans the monkey king back to his home mountain. After Monkey King leaves, White Bone Demon finally captures Tang Seng and takes him back to her home. One of Tang Seng's traveling companions runs off to find the monkey king to help save Tang Seng. On their way back, the two run into the white bone demon's mother (who is also going to eat Tang Seng) and another, lesser demon. They easily kill the two demons, and transform into them in order to fool the white bone demon. Right before Tang Seng is killed, Monkey King and the other companion turn back into themselves, fight with the demon, kill her and save Tang Seng.

Now that you know the story, here is a video of us acting out that whole thing.

Aaaaand....we got second place (out of 12)! Wooo! But seriously glad that's over. I was so nervous. That's all for now, I've gotta go to bed. Hopefully I'll have some more stuff to update you guys on soon!

Qingdao

As I mentioned in my previous post, this past weekend we had Thursday and Friday off due to 清明节 (qingmingjie) which is the Chinese equivalent of Day of the Dead. During this holiday, many families return to their home towns and sweep the graves of their ancestors (the name literally means Tomb Sweeping Holiday). But, the only thing it meant for my friends and me is that we got to go to Qingdao! Wooo!

Qingdao is an adorable little city on the coast of China, almost parallel with South Korea. During the late 1800's and early 1900's, it was seized by the Germans as retribution for the Chinese killing 2 German missionaries. Instead of being the, stiff, boring, grid of a regular Chinese city, Qingdao had a very European feel to it as we walked past lovely architecture on winding streets.

To get to Qingdao, we took the 高铁 (gaotie) or high speed train which ended up only taking about 5 hours. The inside was kind of like a plane, but with more leg room and we actually had some pretty good scenery on the way there.

Upon arrival, we hailed a taxi and headed over to our hotel. We where going to stay in a hostel, but they where all booked up by the time we got around to it.

After dropping off our stuff, we walked along the coast as we tried to find somewhere to eat dinner. Just by happenstance, we managed to stumble upon an underpass that was chock full of small vendors selling all kinds of seafood and the local brew, Tsingtao beer, readily on tap. Instead of wandering even farther, we decided to eat there. I ended up eating some sort of noodle thing that didn't fill me up at all. So I went back and got...squid. On a stick. It was SO GOOD! I also got some sort of fish jerky stuff. The guys (Eddie and John) bought a plate of crawfish that I then had to demonstrate how to eat all while thoroughly enjoying the 10 kuai pitchers of beer. After eating our fill, we moved on and wandered around the city for a bit. We ended up finding another really interesting area called 1902 street. This street was mor elike an alleyway crammed full of vender selling everything from pineapple, to raw octopus tentacles (draped over the tables) to lizard to snake. We didn't try any of it because we where still full from dinner, but it was really cool just to see.

We turned in early that night and woke up early on Friday to go to the local wine museum. Apparently Qingdao now has a flourishing wine scene, enough so that they felt obligated to build the tackiest museum ever. For real. It was really bad.

Complete with this statue of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine.

Honestly, I'm not sure what was worse, the museum or the crappy glass of free wine we got at the end.

It felt like daggers going down.

No worries, France, Italy, and California. China is a long way off from being a competitor in the wine arena. Thankfully, the next thing we had planned was the beer brewery. I don't know if anyone reading this has ever tried Tsingtao beer, but if you have, it was made in Qingdao. At the brewery, we got to wander around the museum and learn how the beer is made. It was actually pretty cool!

The magical floating beer tap.

Eddie and John in the "drunk room". It was only a 

slanted floor, but it certainly made one dizzy.

After the beer factory, we stopped by a cool restaurant to get lunch. At this restaurant, they had tanks of seafood where you could point and say "that one" and they'll wisk away that eel or fish or whatever you ordered and in about 10 minutes, bring it out to you, freshly cooked. The boys decided to be adventurous and order these prehistoric things.

Which turned out looking like this:

Once you got past the spines and the hard exoskeleton, the meat inside was pretty tasty, though there wasn't very much of it. Eventually we got tired of making a mess and the guys instead switched to using them as puppets.

Over the next couple of days, we explored Qingdao some more, going to places like the Granite Mansion, the aquarium, the Governor's House, Signal park (the highest point in Qingdao where you can get a 360 degree view of the whole city), the Olympic sailing center, the local Olympic torch and various beaches (though it was way too cold to go swimming).

 The Granite Mansion

 No. 2 beach

 Qingdao skyline with the Olympic rings

Olympic torch

The local Catholic church. They 

wouldn't let us inside for some reason.

View of Qingdao from Signal Park

All in all, the weekend was amazing. Qingdao is a beautiful little town that gives you the feeling of having been transported to Europe. It was a wonderful break from Beijing and a great way to spend our 清明节 weekend.

The group: John, Eddie, me, Kate and Hannah