Beijing: The Heart of China

Our third and longest vacation! We were given 7 days off so we decided to spend the time in Beijing and Xian. We spent 4 days in Beijing and 3 days in Xian. For the sake of length, I'm going to do a separate blog for Beijing and Xian (though this one is still quite long...)

Day 1

So, Wednesday April 30th, we brought our luggage with us to school and headed for the train station as soon as the days teaching was over. We took a short train ride to Guangzhou and from there caught our long train to Beijing.

Now when I say long train, I mean LONG. The ride was approx. 21 hours. That's almost an entire day on the train. And when we bought tickets there were only 4 beds left, so most of us were in seats the entire time. 8 hours in, it was announced we had arrived in Changsha (the place we went the week before and it took 3 hours on the speed train...). We were all a little depressed at that point, but we made it through with some good conversation and card games. And some sleep. We even played spaz Uno with a few neighbors :)

In reality, 21 hours wasn't as bad as I'd feared and once we arrived in Beijing we headed out to check in to our hostel. We stayed in older town Beijing, about a 15 min. walk from Tiananmen square.

The street where we stayed.

We took it slow after checking in. I hadn't felt great on the train and still wasn't feeling good at this point, so after finding some food I took a nap at the hostel while the others wandered around the shopping in the area.

Once they returned, we headed off to see the Olympic Nest and Water Cube.

I felt I had to take a picture with it after working
at Underwater Audio for so long :)

It was super windy! I felt like I was going to blow away a couple of times. On the up side, this meant that Beijing's notorious smog cloud was also blown away and we had beautiful blue skies the entire trip.

Day 2

The next day: the Great Wall!

We arranged a tour through our hostel and all met up the next morning. They fed us some McDonald's McMuffins for breakfast and then we drove out to the wall. We went to the Jinshanling section of the wall, which took about three hours to reach. The tour let us have about two hours on the wall- part on a restored section and part on an unrestored section.

The Great Wall is no walk in the park. It's a constant up and down full of stairs- each section different sized than the last. Some of them got pretty steep. At point we even climbed through a window.

Most of our time on the wall, there older ladies followed us and made themselves very helpful- offering a steadying hand or taking group photos for us. They seemed insistent on staying with us. When we finished, we found out why. They were selling souvenirs and wanted us to buy them since they had been so kind to follow us for the last 2 hours. They were extremely persistent.

Once everyone was back down, we ate lunch at a restaurant and then took the bus back to Beijing.

That night we decided to walk down to Tiananmen square and take a look around. This turned out to be easier said than done. We spent literally 15 minutes trying to figure out how to cross the street. Because it's a large road/intersection, there are tunnels to walk under the road instead of crossing the street. We didn't realize this at first, and then we had trouble locating the correct tunnel going the right way... But eventually we succeeded!

The square all lit up

Our first glimpse of the Forbidden City

Day 3

This day was filled with temples, shopping, and Kung Fu.

The first place we went to was the Buddhist Lama Temple (no, not the animal. The Dalai Lama). The temple was beautiful! The temple offered complimentary incense to burn, so the whole complex was full of smoke from so many people praying.

The temple wasn't just one building, but a complex of smaller buildings. Each one had one or more statues of different deities. All of the buildings had bright, detailed decorations and roofs- I love it!

The central building of the complex holds a large statue of the Buddha. I had a hard time getting it all in the photo...

Next up was the Temple of Heaven. It's located inside a large park, and again there are various buildings scattered around.

Me and the lovely Abby :)

Besides the main temple, the only other place we really checked out was the Echo Wall. It's a circular wall where you're supposed to be able to talk at one side and be heard on the other side. Chrissy, Colton and I tried but had no luck.

After that we enjoyed the park setting and relaxed. At one point we found people selling long, twirling ribbons and played with those for a while. We also came across an Asian choir performing on the street.

Once we had finished up we headed over to the Pearl Market, one of the two large and famous markets in Beijing. It's basically several floors full of stands where people are selling all sorts of stuff. Including knock offs and pearls.

I spent most of the time with Colton. We did a little shopping and a lot of looking. It's impossible to count the number of times I was asked if I wanted a scarf, Beats headphones, or chopsticks. Or how many times I was referred to as 'lady.'

That night some of the group went to a Chinese acrobats show and the others (including me) went to a Kung Fu show. It was arranged by the hostel, but did involve waiting in a side road and being driven to the theatre by a Chinese man in a strange little car.

Waiting for the show to start

The show was enjoyable. It had its cheesy moments, but it was fun to watch :)

Day 4

Back to Tiananmen square and the Forbidden City. This time we got across the road much faster and it was actually open :) We did have to go through a passport check before we could enter the square, and some lady in the line got into a fight with security. That was exciting.

We walked through the square up to the Forbidden City. Tiananmen square is so big! There were a lot of people there since it was a holiday, but it didn't even really feel crowded. It was also a little sad knowing what had happened there and that all the Chinese people don't know.

Now, as big as the square was, the Forbidden City is HUGE. It truly is a whole city within Beijing. We didn't see even a fraction of the whole thing. But we did see several building complexes and some gardens.

We spent around 1 hour going through the city and once we reached the other side we split up. Some people went off to try and find the street filled with strange food to eat and the rest of us hiked up a pagoda across the street. The top of the pagoda gives a great view of the entire Forbidden City complex to see just how big it is.

We then headed off to the Silk Market (famous large market #2). This was our arranged meeting place with the rest of the group. We thought it'd be easy to just catch the metro over there. We were wrong. The closest metro station we could find was clear back at the beginning of Tiananmen square where we had started. This meant we walked all the way back around the edge of the Forbidden City. This process took around 40 min. Funny thing, the other half the group had the same problem and never made it to weird food street.

Day 5

It was time to leave Beijing :( So we packed up all of our stuff in the morning and left it in the hostel storage for a while while we did some last shopping around the hostel. Then we headed to the train station. It was a 14 hour overnight train ride to Xian. The best thing? We had sleepers! This meant we each had a bed and slept most of the night :)

Changsha

The next weekend (Apr. 25-27th) the school took us on an all-expense-paid trip to the city of Changsha. Changsha is the capital of the Hunan province, and the future location of a new Bond school. The reason for the trip was that Bond was having a signing ceremony with the real estate company they're partnering with to build their new school. Our job was just to do a few performances and show off the fact that Bond has foreign teachers.

Friday

After we finished teaching at the school we all piled into the school bus and some taxis and headed for the train station. Now when I say all of us, this trip consisted of my entire group (12 people), the Kayin group (14), plus the Chinese teachers (~10). It was a lot of people to keep together and the Chinese teachers were rather cute worrying over all of us getting through the train stations. They acted like we'd never done it before :)

We took a speed train to Changsha, so the ride was only about three hours. When we arrived we all piled onto another bus and drove to the hotel. That's right- a real hotel. Everyone was beyond excited for this. Several girls actually jumped on the beds. We chilled at the hotel for a while and ate dinner there too.

I'll never understand the logic behind
glass bathrooms...

My amazing room. Soft carpet, soft pillows, and
of course a soft bed!

Saturday

The next morning we got up and ate breakfast at the hotel buffet. Let me just mention that Chinese breakfast is very different. The buffet consisted of corn, fried noodles, bread, french fries, and cold cereal with warm milk.

Then we took the bus to the real estate company's venue. We were all told to wear our matching Bond jackets (bright orange) and shirts. And when we arrived we all felt way under dressed.

This party was WAY fancier than any of us expected. There were girls in fancy dresses, a harpist, some magicians, a giant diorama, and even a confetti cannon.

When we first arrived we got to mingle for a while and then we headed over to the outdoor stage to watch the performances the real estate company had arranged. They were much more legit than any of ours- professional magicians, dancers, and a fashion show (though that was a little weird).

At the end of these we were told that we were going to perform the Cha Cha slide. We knew this dance was planned, but we thought it would be later. So we scrambled to work out a few kinks on the side lines and did our best- which wasn't phenomenal.

The illustrious stage.

Then it was time for lunch. They took us to a nice restaurant and fed us some very yummy food. There was even a Portland Trail Blazers game playing on the TV :)

The down side: it started raining.

Luckily the stage was under a large tent, but it was still outside and by the time we got back the ground was very wet. On the up side this did mean there were far fewer people watching us perform. But they were a tough crowd. Consisting mostly of older business men, it was hard to get a reaction out of them. And it probably didn't help that something minor went wrong in almost every performance. But we laughed at each other and had a good time, so it was alright :)

Waiting around, pre-rain.

After taking some pictures (nothing is complete in China unless several pictures have been taken), the Bond people asked for two volunteers. The lucky winners ended up being me and Jordan (from Kayin). When we arrived at our spot we were told our job was to stand, smile, and greet any kids that came by. I think we saw a total of 6 kids, and they barely looked at us. So instead we ended up dancing off and on to the music being blasted through the entire building. It was much more entertaining for us and the adults watching.

Once we were finished at the party we went back to the hotel, had a little free time, and ate more yummy food for dinner at the hotel.

Later that night our Chinese coordinators took us all out shopping in Changsha's old town. This was way cool because all the buildings still look original and traditional. And boy was there a lot of stuff you could buy- all for a good price. It's a little overwhelming. We split up into smaller groups with a Chinese coordinator for ease of movement. I went with Mary's group which included Chrissy, Noor, Kyle, and Jordan. We everyone was finished, we met up at Dairy Queen where we ate Blizzards. I'm pretty sure we all died and went to heaven a little bit :)

After that it was time to go back to the hotel and for what ever reason we had to take taxis. The thing with taxis is they only take up to 4 people and there were 6 of us. Mary found one taxi pretty quick and sent Noor, Chrissy and Kyle off. Finding a second taxi for herself, Jordan and I proved to be much harder. It seriously probably took another 40 minutes to find another free taxi that knew how to get to the hotel. In the end, I'm pretty sure our taxi driver followed Mary's GPS... It was quite the experience and may have involved Jordan trying to chase down a taxi at one point.

Sunday

Our last day we had no official responsibilities, so the school arranged for us to go on a hike before heading home. So after another very Chinese breakfast at the hotel, we headed out for our destination, which happened to be a famous mountain. Why famous? Because the esteemed Chairman Mao wrote a beautiful poem about it while studying in Changsha.

In all seriousness though, it was a beautiful area. And being a Chinese hike there was a lot of stairs and paved walk ways.

At the top there was a Buddhist temple.

On the way down, I let my true gracefulness shine through and may have fallen. I felt rather embarrassed, but thankfully came out with only a bruised knee.

Once we were all safely down we ate some McDonald's for lunch and then reversed our journey home. On the train home there was an adorable little kid who fed Kyle chips for most of the ride. He also split his cookie with Kayryn and tried to have her take him to the bathroom :)

While that was happening, Nick attempted to converse with some Chinese men who spoke no English. When he asked if they wanted to take a picture, instead they showed us all the photos they already had on their phone from the train ride...

In the end, pretty awesome and stress-free weekend. We're all stoked to get to go back at the beginning of June!

Welcome to the zoo, zoo, zoo!

Time to play catch up...

On April 19th we took a day trip to the Guangzhou Safari Park!

There are two important things you need to know about this zoo/safari park:

1. You can ride elephants and
2. You can feed animals

So we were all pretty stoked to go.

This place is HUGE, so we left around 7:30am in order to have sufficient time. At least that's what we thought...

Our typical bus luck meant they were slow that day and then our train ended up not leaving until around 10. And then the metro was a mess. So overall it took us about 4 hours to get to the park.

Once we got there the first thing on our list was to find the baby tiger available for feeding. We found him pretty quick, but sadly he was on rest and not available to feed or take pictures with.

There were so many baby tigers and they
were all adorable!

The next stop was naturally finding the elephants to ride! (Sorry it took so long mom)

Then we looked around at the more normal animals- monkeys, rhinos, birds, giraffes, and tigers.

And finally, since it's China there were pandas! And quite a few of them.

Once we'd looked at all the cute animals we went and watched the tiger show. It was pretty cool and at one point Kayryn got to play tug-of-war with a tiger :)

Even after spending most of the day there we still didn't see everything there is to see. But we had to get home, so we braved the metro again. There was legit traffic control to manage the sheer number of people all trying to go the same way. It took forever and we were glad to get home.