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I forgot to mention that today i received what was once cookies and now I'm think is cereal from my mom. The journey the cookies had was a little rough and is now lots of crumbs, two bags worth but oh so Delicious. Picture of cookies coming tomorrow. I also received a Christmas letter from my Grandpa in Minnesota. It was a Great Way to start my day
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!THANK YOU SO MUCH MOM, DAD, AND GRANDPA SMITH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chinese people forgive foreigners for making cultural mistakes like a parent forgives a child for making mistakes Being polite in china is a different ball game, don’t expect for people to hold doors open or saying excuse me, but they show kindness in different ways. Chinese people never put their phones on silent no matter what the situation and the ring tones are always very loud and long songs that they let play out until they answer Chinese people don’t always use head phones so they will blast music from their cell phones while they walk down a street Chinese people love singing and going to karaoke a lot Chinese people love surfing the Internet Chinese people don’t put their socks or underwear in the washer Chinese people love foreigners with any kind of skill Chinese people do the Chinese squat everywhere Chinese people love Obama if they know who he is It’s bad luck to put your chopsticks in your rice and leave them there it symbolizes death Chinese people always say 你好(ni hao/hello) back with a smile if you say 你好(hello) to them Chinese people are obvious about staring at you Chinese people love taking photos and try to do so like experts Chinese people love taking pictures of foreigners no matter what the situation When Chinese people drink alcohol their faces get cherry red Chinese restaurant don’t have ice Chinese people like drinking warm liquids It’s bad luck to drop your chopsticks on the ground If you order a fish at dinner and the head is facing someone that person must eat the head/eyes to bring luck to the others at the table (if at a important dinner. and usually not common) Chinese wont walk barefoot they always have shoes on Chinese people are very good at remembering names of people
picture is of my class visiting a park to interview people. Today we saw the first signs of snow in Beijing it didn't last long but it was the first and it was very nice to see and reminded me of home. I am now finished with my classes and finals and i am preparing for my big trip. So for those who haven't heard yet i am extending my stay in china for another semester. I made this decision at the beginning of the semester because i love China and i am learning so much about china and life itself. but thats not all I'm also not returning home until may, This Friday me and two other friends i have made here are flying to ho chi min city (saigon)in Vietnam we are going to back pack up the coast stopping at all the city's in Vietnam. hue, hanoi, ha long bay, nha trang, and in laos i will be going to luang prabang, vang vien, and vientiane. in thailand i will be goign to bangkok, phuket, and chiang mai. we will then go into laos and do some river rafting and make our way into thailand where i will be on more beaches with friends and also meet up with the teens from mile high for a day or two. from there i am going back to china where i will go to all the scenic spot in southern china and up the east coast. i will be stopping at such places like guilin known for its rivers and mountains, i will stop in hong kong and also go to Disneyland there. Im stopping in fuzhuo, xiamen, huangshan, yichang/ three gorges, hefei, shanghai, dalian, sheyang, hangzhou, wuhan, nanjing, nanning, wudang mountain, wu tai shan, tai shan, jinan, qingdao, and many other small places along the way. I probably wont be around a computer very much on my trip but if i get the chance i will post up little story's but most likely i am going to post my whole trip up when i get back in Beijing in feb 2/3ish. Some things to look forward to is im going to bring both my camera and my video camera so when i get back in Beijing i will post up a movie of my whole trip with the amazing scenery of china and other parts of asia that i will see.
Here are some more things i have learned about China and its people.
There is military everywhere in china, and some form of security guard at every corner
Chinese people believe that its embarrassing to have a phone that’s less than a hundred dollars, the more advanced and newer the phone the higher status a Chinese person has in the young society
Everybody smokes cigarettes in china
There is a Beijing saying that breathing in Beijing air is like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day (although since the Olympics the sky's have been beautiful and the Chinese government is working on its environmental problems)
There is no ice in Chinese drinks, or china alone
Chinese people drink warm drinks or no drinks at a meal
Chinese people don’t put underwear or socks in a washing machine
Dryers don’t exist in china unless you get it shipped here
Chinese people love it when a foreigner says ni hao to them, Chinese people are very friendly when you take the chance to say hi
Being a foreigner in china is like being a celebrity in America you are pretty much a VIP any where you go
Interesting things i have learned in China! these are all true and things i have experienced first hand many times.
Pedestrians don’t have the right of way
It’s completely normal to yell for the Check to waiter at a meal- Which is Fuwuyuan MIDAN!!!!!
It’s easy to convince a Chinese person you are celebrity
It’s completely normal for a Chinese person to blatantly stare at some one
Chinese often have temper tantrums out in public
Chinese guys will walk around with half their shirt up showing there belly (THE BUDDHA ＢＥＬＬＹ） Most Chinese people dance like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots Chinese people are generally shy There are no lines in china There is no need to wait for a cross walk people just cross into traffic All young Chinese kids have a hole in their pants instead of diapers Everybody does the Chinese squat Kids go to the bathroom out on the street and sidewalk Every Chinese person plays ping pong and bad mitten， ａｎｄ ａｒｅ ｒｅａｌｌｙ ｒｅａｌｌｙ ｇｏｏｄ！！！ Very few Chinese people eat breakfast When eating at a restaurant they fill up every seat during busy times so it’s completely normal for a random Chinese person to be eating at the same table with you Chinese drive at the normal speed limit but there is no turn signals， drivers just start turning into a lane even if there is a car already there Lots of fake money in china Nobody uses seat belts Chinese people love taking photos of foreigners Chinese people love foreigners with blond hair, tall, blue eyes, Chinese people think that every African American is famous like Kanye west the rapper !!!!ＴＨＩＳ is just the start of a long list i have made which i will post more each week.!!!!!!
First on is my visit to temple of heaven, the second video is from the top of damo mountain behind the shaolin temple i ran up this hill like the monks do every day.
I'm sorry i haven't been posting any recent post i have been very busy with my Chinese studies and its getting close to finals so i have to study a lot. Lately i have been having more and more days where i feel so accomplished in my Chinese studying and its feeling like im getting closer to being very fluent. This past weekend i finally found some traceurs (traceurs are people who practice parkour or free running) in Beijing. I met up with them on Sunday and we practiced parkour at a gymnastic building that's right behind the Forbidden city. This parkour club that i found only has two foreigners in it me and a kid from Switzerland, and know one speaks english really besides us to so i had no excuse to speak english on sunday. Which worked out awesome i dont think i spoke more than a couple sentences in english on sunday, and i felt awesome about how much i understood and was able to speak. After my training i got to have some great conversation with cab drivers which made me feel even better about my chinese. Beijing cab drivers are very interesting people and if you talk with them they always have some very interesting things to say. With one cab driver we spent the entire trip talking about American politics and basketball and how much he likes obama and kobe bryant, it was very interesting. Click the link to see a old parkour video i made. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TucbR82AaL0
me and some of the Chinese roomates the teachers dressed up as a chinese opera group me and my chinese roomate huang ning Well to start of finding a costume in Beijing is near impossible, i ended up just wearing kung fu stuff. but the night was a blast with lots of Chinese people confused and the ones that new about Halloween yelling trick or treat at us as we walk down a street. Our school hosted a Halloween party and everyone dressed up and sang karaoke then after we went to the tourist spot Houhai to hang out with other foreigners Celebrating the night.
a store in Urumqi the bazaar in Urumqi The market place Windmill farm Jiaohe ancient village me and one of my teachers Rao laoshi(teacher) the grape vineyard some chingrish turpan flaming mountain at the top i was behind everyone since i did kung fu pics so i ran up the mountain to catch up with people The flaming mountains the monkey king at flaming mountains
sorry about the delay i have been very busy studying Chinese. so back to our silk road trip... we went to the flaming mountains in Turpan which is a mountain with lots of legends around it mainly legends from the famous Chinese book journey to the west. There is also a story about a dragon and how the mountain got its name. At the mountain we hiked to the top and i did lots of kungfu pictures. It was a lot of fun. After we ran down the mountain we went to lunch and had a traditional dance performance for us. After the mountain we went to a grape vinery for a little but and then we went to a ancient city called jiao he. the city looks like a bunch of rocks but once you look closer you can see this old city. it was very interesting. the city is one of the oldest in china. The rest of the day was spent on a bus to Urumqi and we went through a windmill farm. urumqi was really interesting it wasn't what i was expecting at all. it felt like the middle east. signs were in arabic and there were tons of Muslims, and Muslim temples. We went to a popular bazaar in Urumqi and then got on a plane to go to Kanas in Altai.
the grave site of the famous poet xiangshen temple the giant budha our shaolin travel group the giant budha the dragon bridge me and the grottoes the dragon bridge and the grottoes in the background kung fu with Buddha in background
For the last day of our trip we went to the Longmen Grottoes. Which is a whole bunch of old caves most were destroyed, but the site was site. The Longmen grottoes stretches along a river bank and is on both sides with a temple on top of one of the hills as well as the grave site of the famous poet bai ju yi. The grottoes had a hole bunch of Buddhas and some were huge. At the largest one Buddha i ran into a local martial artist and we did kung fu poses and people took pictures. The temple was very touristy and their were no monks but the site was very cool and the views were great. After the Grottoes we went to a village that was built in a sink hole, it was pretty interesting. We spent the rest of our day in luyang to wait for our train that night. We walked around town and went to a mall where we had gone to a dance club the night before called ai pai. There was a concert going on at the mall by the club. We had made friends with the owner and they kept give shout outs to us and the whole crowd would start waving to us. we also hung out at a Internet bar for a little bit, they are very popular in china.
the hill i ran up to see damo's cave, their is a damo statue at the top the pagoda forest trying out the sword i bought in the shaolin monk training center damo's cave damo's temple on the mountain
Wah lum stone in the temple the damo stone in side the temple the kids training in the shaolin training center the entrance to damo's cave the shaolin monk performance training grounds entrance to the grounds
we woke up early on Saturday and got on a bus to shaolin temple. When we got to the temple i immediately started exploring the grounds. The shaolin temple was a little bit of a let down, because of how touristy it was, but it was great to see the birthplace of kung fu. A friend and i ditched the group and started exploring on our own. first we went to the main temple and found the Wah lum stone. I started taking pictures with it and then all the other Chinese tourist started taking pictures with it. After the main temple my friend and i ran up the hill to the Damo cave. Which is a 3000m hike, the shaoin monks run up this hill every day. It was very hard and very tiring, but we did it and i saw the spot were damo meditated for 7 years and cut off his eye lids so that he wouldn't fall asleep during his meditation. In the cave there is a statue of damo and there were three monks inside talking about damo. When i entered the cave to pay my respect the monks stopped their conversation and watched me. After that we ran down the hill and to the Pagoda forest and then we went and saw the 500 lohan. We met up with our tour guide who practices chen tai chi i told him i was going to be late to the bus because i wanted to look for a good sword, and he told me he knows a place. we went into the shaolin training center where there were lots of kids practicing and we went past the monks to some back alley and found the store that is for the monks. I bought two swords one is a qi dynasty sword and the other is a straight sword. The straight sword was the nicest one they had in the store and guess how much they cost.... the first sword was 200kuai the second was 270kuai. 200 kuai is about 30 dollars. It was said to leave the temple but we then went to a kung fu school near by and we learned a form that i had already known called tong bei. the school was amazing there were so many students. The school had 3000 students. after we did the form we went to the performance team of the school and got paired off with them so they could show us around the school and we could practice our Chinese. The monk i got paired off with was really cool we talked alot about kung fu, motivation, and more kung fu. I even got to do some forearm conditioning with one of the monks. when we were leaving the two monks i had met invited me two come back any time. After the day of kung fu we drove to Luoyang to stay the night.
A packed train station in beijing. no lines Me and my friend styles looking at the itinerary for the trip a jade uniform a crystal ball that looks through the levels of the museum the museum
We first took a night train to Zhengzhou in Henan province. We arrived in the morning at Zhengzhou and went to the Henan Museum. The museum was pretty interesting and had a lot of ancient tools and weapons in it. The building was really interesting, it was a pyramid and on the top floor there is a crystal ball to look down through the levels. After the museum we took a bus to the local zhengzhou college to interview students and hang out with them. The college we went to was a travel and english school. we walked into the campus and girls started opening up windows and yelling hello to us. We went to a class that was filled up with girls, there were no guys in the class and we barely saw any guys even on the campus. We started out giving introductions to the class in Chinese and the girls would go crazy every time, especially when i told them i practice kungfu. After we introduced our self's they sang two songs for us and we sang two songs for them, then we paired off and each of us got about 4 to 5 of the girls to interview for an hour and a half. they show us around their school and told me we were pretty much the only foreigners they have ever seen so all of them were really exited to meet us. Every where they brought me we ran into some other students and they would rush up to meet me and some even asked to take pictures and get my autograph. we ended up going to the track field where everyone else was and chatting with other people. The students kept asking me to do some kungfu and then the whole field would go crazy with applause. When it was time to go and we were getting on the bus girls started crying and asking for emails and waving. I have never felt more like a celebritylike the Beatles before. It was a really interesting experience.
To day we got to join with another one of the traveling groups from my school some other classmates. we all went to the Mogao Grottoes which is bunch of old caves that monks built tons of Buddha statues and a couple giant Buddha statues as well. we couldn't take any pictures in the cave but i did find one picture of the inside of one of the smaller caves. The statues were amazing to see the detail and expically how old some of the art pieces were, some date back 2000 years even. After we toured the caves for a whiel we had a really boring lecture about how the pereserve the caves even the teachers with us fell asleep. We didnt get to hang out with the other group to long we had to catch a night train to Turpan.
So This weekend some of us decided to go to the temple of heaven. It was a beautiful day to go see the temple the sky was clear blue. The fall and beginning of winter in Beijing has some of the best weather. The temple was really cool to see, but i will probably go again some other time when their isn't as many people. The park was full of people playing games, singing, and praying in some parts of the park. This tree is 500 years old so everyone is trying to get good luck from it there was a bunch of these people waving ribbons around and dancing it was cool to watch
some kids playing kung fu at the night market during the day the beggar we met at number 80ish when it started getting harder lots of chuar some Chinese guys that were congratulating me on eating a 100 chuar
We started out the day going to the Disney land of Dunhuang, Mingsha sand dunes. while we were there i got to ride a camel, sled down one of the dunes on a bamboo sled, played Frisbee with the other Chinese tourist, saw the crescent lake and temple, and did some kungfu. the camel ride was very interesting, riding a camel is very uncomfortable but was definitely worth the experience. Riding down the dunes on a bamboo sled was awesome it worked so much better than the snowboard in the Colorado dunes. Right before we left we started playing Frisbee with some of the Chinese tourist it was alot of fun. Chinese tourist are really funny they take pictures of everything, and their pretty shy, but once you get them to open up their lots of fun. The rest of the day we just walked around town exploring. The night was the best though, Dunhuang has one of the most popular night markets on the silk road. So there is a tradition starting up at IES that on the two week trip people have a chuar eating contest, we where the second to do this. chuar is just meat on a stick and it is very popular in the west and north of china, especially yang chuar which is goat/lamb. The goal was to eat atleast 100, and i was the only one to eat that many. The second place was 75 chuar. It was a very hard accomplishmentespecially the last 20. while we were eating all of the chuar we kept meeting new people that were around us. we met some people from Holland, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland. There are also a lot of beggars here, we invited one of them to eat with us. He was a very small guy he only went up to my waist. He was one of the nicest people i have ever met, he started telling us his story and about his family. It was very touching to hear the struggle that him and many others go through in china. He wasn't a beggar all day he only did begging at night, he had a job during the day. but the reason why he begged was because he has two kids, a daughter in high school and a son in elementary school, and he wants to get money to pay for their college so they could have a better life than him. After hearing this story we all felt compelled to give him money even though he didn't want us to give him any more since we gave him dinner. so we all put money together and gave him about $100 he started crying and told us that he considers us family because we helped him so much. The night ended with a walk back to the hotel and a beautiful night sky.
