A Week in China pt 2

Food is weird in China.  It's not that they serve food that I don't eat regularly, but they prepare the food in such a fashion that it is nearly impossible to distinguish what exactly you are eating.  While this can be nice, sometimes it can hide nasty surprises (such as bones) or other interesting oddities.  Probably the weirdest concoction I consumed was pork with some kind of mash with sweet potatoes.  While not totally indigestible, it definitely wasn't the most delicious thing I ate.

Yesterday the group went to the Summer Palace.  I'm not sure of its historical importance but it's an amazing place to visit.  Miles of greenery with also birds singing with various plants everywhere.  We only explored half of the Palace in about 4 or so hours of walking.  There was also fun off-road bit where we climbed in a place where we weren't supposed to be but it was fantastic to do something which you know you probably shouldn't be doing.

During this time I discovered that people seem to sell the same thing everyone.  Yesterday everyone was trying to sell Persimmons(or something similar?), corn, vinegar cucumbers, and annoying masks which made blowing noises.  Today people were trying to sell metal engravings of people's names on some sort of medal.  I guess they make some money as it but I don't think it would be a reliable source of income.

Today we visited the Great Wall and the Forbidden City.  Both of these are awesome places to visit and walk, but I'm a little disappointed that the renovations of the Great Wall used modern building styles, especially in the pathing, rather than sticking with the older style of bricklaying.  I really didn't confirm if this is true but you could see the renovated parts were much different from the original brickwork.

The Forbidden City was amazing, with more pagodas and pathways and such than you can shake a stick at.  The problem was that the colors were always the same, red and gold, and the entire place just felt redundant after a while.  The place is beyond massive however, and definitely an impressive feat of engineering.  I got kinda bored at the end simply because as huge as it was it all looked the same.

That being said, I was able to get some great pictures while I was over there.  When I can actually upload them I will but until then I just need to make sure not to lose my phone.

China, a Week in Beijing

I actually wrote this a while ago and decided to post it here.  I am in China so I decided to update my blog every day or so while I'm over here. Hope people enjoy it.

The plane flight was excruciating. The last time I flew international was on Lufthansa (sp?) airlines which had power-cables for computers, a decent screen, and some actual legroom. This flight on United Airlines, on the other hand, was tightly packed full of people like sardines in a can for 14-15 hours. I don't think I got much sleep so I've been up for pretty much 20+ hours right now haha. The nice thing about this is that because it screwed up my sleep/wake/active cycle so much I don't have to worry about the time change since somehow I'm properly adjusted (hopefully).

The food here is really different. Not only is it freshly prepared but there are several choices of food. There's a stirfry, soup, and probably some other stuff which I haven't discovered yet. The problem will be ordering since only one of us knows rudimentary Chinese while the rest of us know nothing. There are some students who speak both English and Mandarin, and they were nice enough to tour us around Beijing which was nice of them. I would have taken pictures but my phone/camera/tuner/mp3 player/metronome was used to survive the 14 hour flight, so hopefully tomorrow I'll take some pictures.

So far culture shock isn't so bad. It probably helps that us Oberlin students are sticking together especially since we're just sorta trying to figure out what we're supposed to do. We haven't seen the Dean anywhere either so we've basically been doing everything by ourselves with help from the conservatory students.