July 28th, 2010/10:47PM [Chicago]
For the past 9 days we’ve been participating in a summer program that brings together Chinese kids from all over the world to “seek our roots” or something along those lines. Met a lot of lovely people from a lot of different places while seeking those roots. I’m gonna look through pictures and try to remember what I can about each day of the program and ramble for a bit..
7/19 DAY 1: Oriental Pearl Tower & Huangpu River Boat Ride
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| Hotel hotel, bus bus. Say hey to my little sister on the left. |
7/20 DAY 2: World Expo
7/21 DAY 3: Wuxi
It’s really hard for me to sleep on moving vehicles or airplanes. During the first couple of bus rides, I would be the only one that was awake among the six of us. Then it gradually became a reflex to fall asleep within the first 5 minutes of getting onto the bus. In Wuxi, we went to some technology center and saw some neat things. Then we visited a college and an arts school to interact with some students there. The arts school students performed about eight acts for us; they were all really young and talented. Afterwards we went to this gorgeous temple that had an enormous Buddha statue rising out of these mountains. We stayed at Wuxi for a night and got really lucky with room assignments. Some of us were assigned random, larger rooms so we hung out there that night and invited people from the Australian and Austrian groups over. Two words: Boat Races.
7/22 DAY 4: Nanjing Stadium
We had some important-looking people speak to us at this Nanjing Olympic Stadium. Afterwards two famous Chinese Olympians talked to us and answered some questions. One was a gymnast and the other a shot-putter I believe. They were both really sweet and down to earth about everything. I have so much respect for people like them. They were precious. We toured the stadium and saw a huge pool, badminton courts, basketball courts, and a big ice rink. The ice rink was the only place there that had air conditioning so we definitely stayed there as long as we could. That night, we had a formal dinner and I took pictures of almost every dish – they were so pretty. There was a bottle of wine going around and an Aussie gave me some to taste. Just so you know, alcohol in China isn't the best...
7/23 DAY 5: Nanjing
Pretty busy day. We walked up hundreds of steps at Sun Zhong Shan’s burial place, and then fed pigeons at Yin Le Tai in the same area. It was kinda hard to get the pigeons to eat out of our hands. One pigeon actually flew up to one of my Aussie friend’s shoulders to eat out of his hand. Not fair. After lunch, we went to see the memorial for the Nanjing Massacre of which there were over 300,000 victims. The memorial was incredibly sad but I loved its design. We met three guys from Canada towards the end of the memorial and one kid was actually Japanese. It must’ve been really interesting for him to see all that – he said he definitely isn’t proud of the incident. We saw this silk museum afterwards and the looms they were using were incredible. That night we had about two hours of free time to shop and buy snacks and breakfast for our train ride that night to Beijing. Two of the other girls and I went to get our nails done. I felt like we were definitely getting ripped off since we were wandering around in our tour group shirts. Even though the price was still really cheap, I bargained the price down even more. I was kinda proud of myself but I still feel like we got ripped off a bit. Oh well, French manicure for less than $4 and my nails still look fine right now. We went to the train station that night; it was the first time I rode in an overnight train! There were six bunks to a compartment so it was perfect the six of us. We couldn’t shower even after we were disgusting all day so I was looking forward to getting to the hotel in Beijing the next morning.
7/24 DAY 6: Beijing Resort
The resort we stayed at held all 6,000-ish of the entire “root-seeking” group and there were people from about 50 different countries there. The resort was huge and held an indoor carnival, badminton courts, archery, a pool, and all these hot springs. Everything was really expensive but our group got a discount. Sucks that everything isn’t included with the hotel and needs to get paid for separately. Silly China. We had this entire day to explore since all the groups were arriving at different times throughout the day. Our group was one of the first to arrive and got to the resort from the train station at around 10 in the morning. We wandered around and met a ton of random people from all sorts of places.
7/25 DAY 7: Beijing Welcome Ceremony & Summer Palace
Hundreds of our huge tour buses got all 6000 of us to The Great Hall of the People in Beijing for a welcome ceremony type event. It took all of us forever to get into the building since there were so many of us. The vice-president of China spoke to us along with some other important-looking people. He had an extremely monotone voice so that was…fun. We saw some amazing performances afterwards though. There were these monks who flipped and broke things with their heads and did all sorts of tricks with tons of different weapons. I got to see the Thousand-Hand Bodhisattva, which is this famous performance by these girls who are all deaf. Youtube it or something. It was amazing. Afterwards, the Summer Palace was gorgeous but it was incredibly hot outside. Good thing we didn’t pass out I guess. My memory card filled up and my battery was dead at this point so I don’t have too many pictures of this day but it was too hot regardless. The first we do when we get off the bus is run into our hotel room, strip, and shower. We met a couple French kids that night. It was different because so far we’ve mostly been hanging out with the Aussies and other Americans. We had to speak Chinese with the French since their English is supposedly awful. They were all really nice, even though we couldn’t talk to most of them.
7/26 DAY 8: The Great Wall & The Forbidden City
When I pictured going to The Great Wall I definitely didn’t visualize so many people so close to each other. While climbing the stairs to the top, you’re basically touching all the other sweaty people surrounding you and making sure you don’t fall on your face because the stairs are so steep and uneven. It was still amazing though! The Forbidden City we went to see afterwards was huge. Our tour guide talked a lot about the king’s concubines…it was pretty interesting. It was so big, I can’t even imagine what living there would be like.
7/27 DAY 9: Temple of Heaven & Olympics
Last day! We saw this temple where the kings worshipped God then had lunch near the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. We toured the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube and both were awesome. The Bird’s Nest is a lot bigger then it looked and there’s apparently a waterpark in the Water Cube. I didn’t get to see it but they had a bird’s eye model of the inside of the building and a big part of it was this huge waterpark. The swimming pool was enormous. We ended the day with a closing ceremony-type event. They showed a video made up of video clips and pictures they took throughout the 4 days in Beijing and all the news stories that covered our program. Jackie Chan couldn’t make it so there was a video clip from him also. Different groups performed from a variety of countries and everything was at this stage they used for something in the Olympics so it was cool. We got home late but still stayed up to say bye to all the friends we made. Wah, I miss them already!
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