China

I finally realized why Hong Kong and China are listed separately on our itinerary and shirt so I feel like I should respect them as separate places now even though they’re technically one country. Anyway, I flew from Hong Kong to Beijing for a guided tour I signed up for through a company called China Guide. I went to the airport with two of my friends. Getting there was quite an adventure by itself and then when we got there we realized that none of us had even written down our flight number or information or anything and we didn’t have tickets because the company had told us we didn’t need them, just our passports. So that was fun too trying to figure out which flight or even which airline we were supposed to be using. Eventually we got it though but found out our flight was delayed almost 3 hours so we got to spend some quality time in the airport. We arrived in Beijing at about 10 and made it to the hotel a little after 11. The next day we went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City and the silk market and then we drove to the Jinshanling portion of the Great Wall and spent the night there. Sleeping and hiking on the Great Wall is definitely the coolest thing I’ve ever done. It was gorgeous watching the sun rise over the mountains and the wall. I think those are my favorite pictures from the semester so far. The next day we drove back to the city for lunch and went to another market. Oh, I bought a really cool traditional Chinese silk dress at the first market. It almost fits. I’m not shaped quite like an Asian girl. Anyway. That evening we went to an acrobatics show. It was so cool. I was really tempted to buy a dvd of the performance but realized that would be kind of silly. I would definitely go to another show though!

We spent that night and the next day in Beijing. We went to the panda exhibit at the zoo and saw the drum tower and the Olympic buildings and the Summer Palace. And had more Chinese food. It was really good but too much meat and not very good quality meat. That evening we took a sleeper train to Xi’an. Very fun except they didn’t give us breakfast that morning. That day we went to see the Terra Cotta Warriors and the city wall. Then we got on another sleeper train to Shanghai.

We got to the ship in Shanghai around 8:00 the morning of the day it was to leave. There was something weird going on with immigrations so they took our passports to make copies and then we ended up not being allowed off the ship until almost 1:00 in the afternoon. They also changed on ship time to an hour earlier so we had to be back by 5 which meant we had a good 3 hours in Shanghai. It seemed like it would be a fun city to spend more time in. We took a taxi to the Oriental Pearl TV tower. Shanghai has really cool towers and buildings and lights. So does Hong Kong. Oh and we ate at Subway. Chinese Subway cookies taste a little different than in America.