Adventures in China

(This post was written a few days ago but I have been having difficulties with slow internet and picture uploading. My laptop doesn’t seem to like to insert photos properly with the blog software. Sorry for taking so long. If you would like to see a slightly larger version of the pictures click on them.)

Don’t worry, I’m still alive. I apparently haven’t written for more than a week. In this time the Texas kids have left our class because they thought it was too hard so we’re back to just us UMD students. I have had two massages, one before the weekend and one after the weekend. The second was better than the first. We left for Xi’an on Friday afternoon. We flew from Qingdao to Xi’an. We stayed in different hotels each night since we traveled to different cities around there. The first day we saw the wall that surrounds Xi’an and the Terracotta Warriors. We also visited a factory where they make the replica warriors to sell. When I say factory I mean they show us how they make them by having one or two people there to show you how they do it. You don’t see the real factory. The real Terracotta Warriors were really neat. I included a picture of one of the pits that had the most warriors, there were four pits total one of which was empty. The dynasty was overthrown before they finished making all of the warriors. I won’t get into the history behind it since I don’t know it all but you can look it up if you’re interested. The picture doesn’t really shown the size of these warriors very well. They are taller than me but since they were below us it looked like they were much smaller than they are. I have some other pictures of some that were being restored but you will have to wait to see those until I get home. I’ll post them on my photo gallery and let you know when I get them up there. It was one of the more interesting things that we’ve seen. We had a couple hour drive to our hotel after seeing the Terracotta Warriors.

The next day we climbed Mount Hua which is one of the, I believe, eight most famous mountains in China. It was pretty cool but tiring. We climbed a lot of stairs but didn’t make it to the top of the west peak. It would have taken us too long but we did make it to the top of the north and central peaks. I’ve included a picture of this mountain too. The left side of the picture is around where we stopped climbing. After the mountain we had a four hour drive to our hotel so we didn’t do anything besides eat. We were all pretty worn out.

The next day we went to the Longmen Grottoes and the Shaolin Temple. The Longmen Grottoes were pretty neat. There were a lot of statues but unfortunately most of the faces were destroyed at one point in time. The Shaolin Temple is a monastery and they also teach martial arts there. We saw the Pagoda Forest along with the temple. There have been some Chinese movies that were filmed there. We also saw a martial arts show there. I thought it was better than the one in Shanghai because it was more martial arts and didn’t focus so much on a story. After that we headed to the train station where we had our fifteen hour train ride. We were all pretty sweaty from the 90 degree weather but overall we enjoyed the train ride. We had beds that were just as hard as our beds back in the dorm so it really wasn’t that bad. I slept most of the way so that was nice. Once we got back some of us went right to the massage place where we got to shower and then get massages. It felt so nice to be clean and get a massage. My calves were pretty tight from climbing the mountain. Class started again today but we only have two weeks left now. Before we know it we’ll be back home. At least we’re not missing any good weather in Duluth from what I’ve been hearing. That’s it for me. I just thought I’d let everyone know I’m still alive. Thanks for the emails too, I will get back to people the internet is so slow most of the time I’m not very motivated to type out emails since it takes a while. I’ll leave with a picture of a few of the guys in our group climbing these stairs that went straight up a wall on Mount Hua. The top guy is Mitch, then Grant, and finally Kyle. Yes I did follow them after taking the picture. Even our fifty some year old professor with bad knees followed us instead of shaking his head at us.

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China, travel