China: They Played the Numa Numa Song at the Great Wall AND During My $6 Haircut

Day 1:

We docked in Hong Kong. Nicky and I decided not to go on the city orientation we had signed up for because the one in Vietnam wasn’t all that great. The place the ship docked was really weird – you had to walk through a mall to get to and from the ship. We went with Tara and walked through the mall and searched for an atm. We saw a Starbucks and I had to succumb to getting some because I haven’t had any all semester and it sounded really good at the time. We went to a “ladies market” which is really just an outdoor market and isn’t actually for ladies in particular. We walked around for a little while; a lot of places sold really random stuff. Tara wanted to stay because she had a lot of gifts to buy for family and friends but she told Nicky and I that she felt fine staying alone. We walked around the area for a little while and then went back to the ship area. We took a ferry to Hong Kong Island, which is where most of the skyline and important areas of Hong Kong are anyway. The ship had docked on another island that is a part of Hong Kong called Kowloon, but I’m probably spelling that wrong. We found the “longest escalator in the world,” which is really a set of lots of little escalators. You go up an escalator for awhile and then you walk a few feet to get to the next one. Sometimes they are escalators and other times they are moving sidewalks uphill. Apparently in the mornings they go down so people can get to work, but for most of the day they go up. It was convenient for getting to other places of the city. We got off in an area that looked really Chinese, and by that I mean that we were the only white people there. We went into a restaurant because we wanted to eat something really authentic. They handed us an English menu that I’m pretty sure had much higher prices than the Chinese menu did because it seemed like we paid a little too much for our food but whatever. I open the menu and the first page is titled “Assorted Snakes Banquet.” I laughed hysterically and pointed it out to Nicky, who decided to order a snake soup. I ordered lemon duck. The food was good; Nicky’s snake soup was better than I expected but not amazing. My lemon duck was really good but almost too sweet. The tea tasted like dirty water. I really don’t like green tea at all but I found myself drinking kind of a lot of it in China because I was always cold. We left the restaurant and walked around for awhile. There were some small shops and stuff lining the streets. One had all this paper and wooden Chinese trinkets and stuff and we picked up one thing that we didn’t know what it was and a guy saw us looking at it and told us it was a tissue box cover but he pronounced it “teeee-shoe box” which for some reason really made me laugh. After we walked around for a little while, we continued up the escalator. We took it to the top and then decided to walk down so we could see things that we missed. We came across some botanical gardens that were combined with some “zoological gardens” so we walked around there for awhile. Nicky used the bathroom there and came out and told me that the urinal was like a giant waterfall that you just peed into so I made him go back in and take a picture for me. I had to see it and it was either that or go into the men’s room. We kept walking and we got really confused as to where we were. We were walking on paths that were clearly designed for pedestrians but we were walking through places that it didn’t feel like you should be walking through, like under overpasses for cars. We had no idea where we were going, we just figured if we kept walking downhill we would eventually get to a place we either recognized or could at least find a taxi. We came across “Hong Kong Park” so we walked around there for awhile. We saw the “tea ware” museum, which was supposed to be a stop on our city orientation. It was free so we went in and it was the most ridiculous museum I have ever seen and I was so glad I didn’t go on the city orientation. It was empty rooms with some teapots and other tea things in it. On the way out there was a stand where old people wrote our names in Chinese. Nicky, who since college has decided he is too cool for that name, told them to write Mike and I, obviously, told them to write Sarah. They pronounced our names “Miiiikeyyy and Saaawwwaahhhh” Later in the trip, we learned that Chinese people translate names to Chinese characters by the way they sound so it made sense later why they kept sounding our names out really awkwardly. After Hong Kong park, we took the ferry back to the ship and met Megan, Jordan, Nikki, and Tom for dinner. We took the ferry back over and took the peak tram up to Victoria Peak which has really good views of the city. There was supposed to be a “light show” throughout the skyline but it was a lame excuse for a light show. We came back down on the peak tram and tried to get the taxi drivers to take us back to the escalator but they wouldn’t. We assumed they wouldn’t because it was such a short distance, but taxi drivers in China charge a flat rate to begin with and then the price goes up really slowly as you keep driving. So, he would have gotten the flat rate, which was less than $2 USD, regardless, so that was weird. We walked around until we found the escalator and took it up until we found an Italian restaurant called Fat Angelo’s that Nicky and I had seen earlier. After an afternoon of snake soup and with the knowledge that we were going on a semester at sea trip and would probably be eating mainly Chinese for the next few days, we were okay eating something like Italian. Dinner was really good even though the waiter was kind of confused by a lot of things. After dinner we came back to the ship and I packed for my trip the next day.

Day 2:

We left the ship around 10:00 for our flight to Beijing. Immigration at the airport was pretty intense, especially since flying to/from Hong Kong to other parts of China is considered an international flight, which is really weird. The process at the airport took much longer than in any other country we’ve been to, including the US. The flight to Beijing was about 3 hours but it didn’t feel too long. They served us a meal that was actually pretty good and we got mini containers of haagen daaz ice cream. Flying anywhere in the USA after this trip is going to be really annoying because I think we are the only country that doesn’t give you something to eat and drink for free. We got to Beijing and buses took us to dinner. Every meal we had in China consisted of a ton of food being put on a rotating disc in the middle of the table and everyone taking what they wanted. Dinner was sooo good. One of the things they served was peking duck which I really liked. You were supposed to wrap it in a rice paper tortilla-esque thing and put this really good sauce on it. It was times like that when the communal eating style was kind of annoying because I wanted to eat all of it myself. Sometimes it was kind of hard to tell what things were and Megan tried to ask them what something was and they told her it was pork. She pointed to something different and the guy said “sheep” and then started laughing hysterically with his friends. The way he was laughing made me assume he was kidding and giving us a hard time but it was China so you never really know. As we were trying to use chopsticks, a girl dropped a piece of chicken in her drink. We all laughed, but little did we know that at literally EVERY meal that we ate after that on the trip, SOMEONE would drop a piece of food in a drink. Megan referred to it as a microcosm for all the little problems we ran into in China that were ultimately meaningless and pretty funny. I managed to never drop food in my drink, but one time I asked Nicky to grab something for me and he dropped it in my drink so I still was unable to drink for half of one meal. After dinner, we got to the hotel. It wasn’t anywhere near as nice as other hotels semester at sea has put us in, but even though the nice hotels are really cool, we never spend any time in them and in the back of my mind I always think about how they are kind of unnecessary, so I was fine with where we were staying in Beijing. Some of us wanted to go out and walk around and get some kind of dessert, maybe a pastry, and a cup of coffee. 8 of us went out to do that, not realizing how many problems we were going to run into. In Hong Kong, a lot of people spoke some English. We knew that it would be easier in Hong Kong because it used to be a British area, but we thought that other parts of China wouldn’t be THAT bad, because we knew that a lot of people learned English in school. I guess what we should have realized was that only educated Chinese people would really know any English. We walked around for awhile and realized our hotel wasn’t really in downtown Beijing and was kind of in the middle of nowhere. We found one pastry shop but it didn’t have a place to sit down so we kept walking. 3 people were standing outside one restaurant and they were dressed funny so we stopped to look at them and before we knew it we were being ushered into the building and up the stairs to the restaurant. We decided to look at the menu to see if they had any dessert and coffee since that’s what we wanted, but they only had really weird shit. Some people tried to order the most dessert-like things we could find on the menu, but they were things like “sesame cakes” and “refried bean rolls” (that actually tasted nothing like beans at all). The people in the restaurant spoke NO english and it took us a good 5 minutes to even get a menu. After people had ordered, she came out and said something along the lines of “2 sesame rolls?” and the two people who had ordered it pointed to themselves. Based on the picture on the menu, there were supposed to be 4 rolls per order, but she told us “we only have 5” as she held up 4 fingers. The rest of the time was pretty much like that. Megan and I left early to try to go back to that pastry shop, but we got there at 9:10 and it had closed at 9 so that was depressing. We really wanted coffee still so we tried to ask people on the street. We would go up to people and ask them if they spoke English and some legitimately didn’t but others just didn’t want to help us. One person responded, in perfect English, with “no, I don’t speak English.” Finally Megan went into a barber shop and asked about coffee and they recognized the word and we found the kind of place we were looking for. We squeezed 8 people in a booth that was probably meant for 6 and got irish coffee. The menu at this place was hilarious. In Thailand, we noticed that they spelled a lot of English words wrong or would use the wrong words sometimes in translations, but NOTHING compares to the signs and menus in China. One item on the menu was called “strawberry acid milk with.” First of all, what is acid milk?! Second of all, with what??? This was just a menu full of mysteries. After that we went back to the hotel and went to bed. Before bed, I took a shower and ran into a small problem. We didn’t really have a bathtub OR a shower stall, we just kind of had a shower area. It had a curtain but halfway through my shower I realized the curtain didn’t reach all the way to the bottom and water leaked halfway across the floor while I was showering. My main goal was to keep it from reaching my dry pajamas on the ground, which it didn’t, so beyond that I didn’t really care.

Day 3:

We left for the Great Wall around 7:00am. As soon as we got there, we realized it should be renamed the great STAIRCASE of China. It was a lot more work than I expected. I knew what it looked like and that some climbing would be involved to get to a high enough point for good views, but I guess I just expected ramps and not stairs. I was afraid my body would have a repeat of table mountain but luckily the crazy Chinese and their rice for breakfast served me and my carbohydrate needs well. We climbed for awhile until we got to a good place to see things well. It was really cool to be there but it wasn’t really the views I was expecting. Apparently there are 2 popular places to go, but the one we went to is a little closer to Beijing so that’s where most people go. Personally I would have been fine driving longer to get the better views but whatever. We spent a couple of hours at the wall and then went to lunch. Lunch was REALLY good and after we ate we went to a shopping area that it was attached to. After lunch, we went to the Summer Palace. The Chinese girl who had been riding the bus with us and taking us places (she wasn’t technically a guide so I don’t know what to call her) walked us around for awhile. We walked through the palace area, which was in a really pretty place on a lake and stuff like that. Then, we walked through some of the “longest painted corridor in the world.” We got about halfway through and the woman told us that there were 2 ways to get back to the bus. She said we could walk through the 2^nd half of the corridor or we could pay $10 chinese dollars (less than 2 USD) to go up some stairs into a temple and then walk back down the stairs and we would be led right to the bus. We didn’t have much time left, and we didn’t want to climb TOO many stairs after the great staircase of China, but we wanted to see the temple so we asked her how long it was. She said it was a really short staircase with only 100 stairs. She said that the Chinese have a saying “if you climb 100 stairs you will live 100 years.” For some reason saying it like that made it sound a lot more appealing so we decided to do it. 100 stairs was a LIE. It was a lot more stairs than that and by the time we got up there we had to rush around, which sucked because it was a lot prettier than in the beginning. After the temple, we had to go down a long path to get to the bus and there were really pretty bridges over water and stuff like that. We wished we had more time there and had spent less time on our tour at the beginning. After the summer palace, we went to Tsinghua University. Students met us there to give us a tour of the campus. There was one Chinese student for about 6 of us. Our students’ name was Tara so we walked around for awhile while she gave us the campus tour. We asked her a lot of questions and she asked us a lot too. While we passed some athletic fields, she asked us what our favorite sports to play are and we told her; she said hers is badminton, which for some reason I thought was funny. Apparently that’s a pretty popular sport in China because after her, I heard several more people talk about it. After the tour, we went to one of the campus dining halls and ate dinner with Tara and got to talk to her some more. She told us some really interesting things about China. She said that going to college in China is based entirely on test scores. The test is way more intense and comprehensive than our SAT. It covers more subjects, including English. Every Chinese person that goes past elementary school has to learn English. I think she said they usually start learning when they are 13. You take the test and you are offered admission to some schools and not others based on your score. We asked her what she thinks about China’s one child policy and she said that it is hard but effective. She said China is so big that something needed to be done. She explained that since she is an only child and will most likely marry an only child, she will be allowed to have 2 children. We asked her if she wants girls, boys, or both and she said “oh girls of course! They are easier to teach!” We thought that was a funny comment because so many people in China would prefer to have a boy. Some things we tried to ask her were kind of hard to communicate but it made it funny. Megan got an ice cream bar from the dining hall and it tasted exactly like a buttered popcorn jelly belly. She asked Tara, “What flavor is this?” Tara didn’t understand the question at all. She took the wrapper and looked really confused and said, “ice cream taste?” and then proceeded to read us the ingredients from the wrapper. After the university visit, we went back to the hotel. The night before, Megan and I had seen a Sweeny Todd-esque barber shop (not the same one Megan asked about coffee) and commented on how we kind of both needed haircuts. It was decorated in all blacks and reds and had huge gold mirrors. All the hairdressers had kind of crazy hair and they played loud music. It looked like an all around fun place and based on how much our other experiences in China had made us laugh so far, we thought it would be funny to try to get one there. We went there and managed to get the point across as to what we wanted. Megan wanted her hair trimmed straight across but I needed my layers trimmed. It seemed like they understood so they took us over to wash our hair. They massaged my head way better than they would in the USA. I kind of hoped Megan and I would get to sit next to each other while we got our hair cut, but we didn’t. The guy cutting my hair was really flamboyant and even though he spoke NO English, he made me laugh. He started cutting my hair and it seemed like he was doing it the same way they would in the USA. One woman that worked there but wasn’t cutting either of our hair spoke a little bit of English. She came up behind me and I saw her eyes widen in the mirror. She started yelling at him and he started arguing back with her. 3 people were behind my hair all of the sudden. I got really scared that he was doing something crazy back there. The woman who spoke some English left for a minute and went to talk to Megan. She came back to me and said, “ummm you want your hair cut in a line?” I was kind of confused and I said, “well uhhh kind of but a lot of lines and I separated some of my layers to show her that I needed it trimmed in different places.” She said “OH, different from she?” and pointed to Megan. I realized that she thought I wanted my hair cut the same way Megan did, which I didn’t. I was like oh yeah, different! And she looked relieved and laughed and left. It was funny because the guy cutting my hair didn’t speak any English, but the gestures he did after that happened were so clear. He started kicking her away and saying things and making movements like he wanted to tell me, “psshhh don’t listen to her! I know what I’m doing!” It was really funny. The haircut cost the equivalent of $6.50 USD. When I go home, I’m not going to want to pay for ANYTHING at our prices! After our haircuts, the woman who spoke some English wanted to learn some English from us. She drew pictures of different haircuts (straight across, layers, tapered ends, etc) and wanted us to write down the English words for her. As we were about to leave, she wanted to take a picture with us. As we were taking the picture, other random people that hadn’t even dealt with us while we were there wanted to get in the picture. It’s true; Chinese people just love pictures. After the haircut, 7 of us wanted to go to the water cube (Olympic swimming stadium) because it’s supposedly lit up at night. Apparently I’m not meant to see ANYTHING lit up at night, because just like the Torre Acbar in Spain, it was NOT lit up. Since there were 7 of us, we took two taxis. The other group paid their taxi when they got there but then just had him take them back to the hotel. When our taxi printed us our receipt, which was $13 chinese dollars, we handed him exact change. He got really angry and kept motioning toward the money. We had no idea what he wanted because we gave him exact change. We thought maybe he wanted a tip, which isn’t customary in China but sometimes they expect it from Americans because they know we usually do it. We tried to give him another dollar and he got even more angry. He started doing the Chinese equivalent of cursing us out. We were SO confused and someone tried to take out a 20, which is only about $3 USD and figured we could just give him the 20 and we could take the 13 back and maybe he would start yelling. He wouldn’t even take the 20 and gestured at us to get out so we got out as quickly as possible and found a new taxi back to the hotel. Megan and I hung out in Nicky and Derek’s room for a little while that night, but we went to bed relatively early that night because we were exhausted.

Day 4:

We went to Tiananmen Square and the forbidden city aka imperial palace in the morning. It was a little frustrating that we weren’t really given any information on the places we were going because I didn’t really know anything about the massacres that occurred there. Sometimes the tours people give us are a little bit overdoing it and I feel like I get TOO much information. But, in China we didn’t really get anything. Apparently in 1989, a lot of students protested in the area in favor of democracy and against some of the communist ideals enforced under Mao’s government and eventually there was a huge massacre. According to Nicky, we learned about this in 11^th grade in world history, but history goes in one ear and out the other to me. I’ve been better about learning history on

this trip because I can actually SEE what I’m learning about, but in high school I absorbed pretty much nothing. We didn’t hear anything about any of that, but I guess even if we had had professional tour guides we still wouldn’t have heard about it. Someone in one of my classes said they had a tour guide and they tried to ask about it and they said, “oh no no, we can’t talk about that here!” Later on their bus, the guide tried to explain why the right thing had been done in the situation and stuff along those lines – basically a bunch of brainwash. One of my teachers said there had been a documentary on our tv here (I’m soo glad semester at sea informed us..) about the massacre and one analyst referred to brainwash-like situations like that as “the pact with the devil” in that when the Chinese wanted to have more of a capitalistic-type economy, they were given malls and stuff like that but most of their freedom of expression and what we would call “first amendment rights” were taken away. After walking through the square, we walked through the forbidden city. It was really cool for a little while but it all looked kind of the same to me. I could have handled spending much less time there. While we were at the forbidden city, me, Nicky, and Megan were looking at an interactive map, which is actually a really cool invention that American tourist spots should adopt. It showed you where you were and you could press various things, like bathrooms, food, etc and it would light up on the map. You could scroll through the screen and see zoomed in and zoomed out views of the whole layout. As we were looking at the map, a Chinese person tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I will take photo with you?” I noticed in China that when people know English, they don’t use words that we would use to imply permission. We would say “can I” or “will you” or “may I” or something along those lines. When we drew pictures and translations for the woman in the barber, she said, “you will give this to me?” Anyway, this man asked me “I will take photo with you?” I laughed and said yes and on the way to take the picture, he touched my hair a little bit. Anywhere else that would have been pretty creepy but I think they were just fascinated by anyone who didn’t have dark brown hair, and since Megan and Nicky both do, they were drawn to me first. I took a couple awkward pictures with two people, but after awhile they wanted Megan and Nicky to join in too, and then more Chinese people joined in, and it was just a really funny random situation. One or two of the guys spoke some English, and he told Megan and I that we were very beautiful. If I could get guys in my own country to start treating me like that, that would be nice. After the Forbidden City, we went to the Temple of Heaven. I felt similarly about it as I did with the Forbidden City; it was cool at first but it all kind of looked the same. We were standing in front of one of the temples and Megan said to me, “This looks just like the other one…but with 3 levels instead of 2…but they pretty much look exactly the same.” We had been so used to no one speaking English that I guess we had started to say whatever we would normally say and didn’t really care who heard us. An asian guy in front of us turns around and, in perfect English, says “That is a VERY accurate description!” It startled us at first but we had a pretty funny conversation with him after. He was from the USA and was only visiting and pretty much felt the same way we did about all of these famous sites. We’re lucky he didn’t turn around and say something like, “That is so disrespectful of you!” After the Temple of Heaven, we went to an acrobat show. It was a lot like cirque de soilei, but it was even cooler because we didn’t know what to expect. When I saw cirque de soilei in the USA, I loved it but I had high expectations. We had no idea what to expect from this so when it was that entertaining, it exceeded whatever we thought it would be. The beginning was pretty weird – they had birds fly over the audience and other weird things. But, after awhile they just did really cool tricks and stuff and pretty much made me feel like my body is completely useless. After the show we went to an indoor market. We had to get our own dinner that night but the only things around were McDonalds, Subway, and fast-food-like Chinese. We had been eating such good Chinese food that we weren’t really in the mood for the fast food version. We ended up eating McDonalds, even though that isn’t what we wanted either. They had some deal going on where you got a spicy chicken sandwich, fries, a drink, and their version of apple pie for a good price. Nicky ordered first and was given a “red bean pie.” Not as weird as Thailand’s tuna pie, but still pretty gross. Megan and I made sure we didn’t get that and we got a pineapple pie. Also kind of weird, but at least it was sweet tasting. We went back to the hotel and it felt weird to be back by 9:30 on our last night in Beijing. Nicky and I still wanted to do stuff but everyone else kind of felt like just hanging out at the hotel. We didn’t really have anything in mind to do, so we took a taxi to a street that Tara said was right by her school and had a lot to do on it. When we got there, it seemed like a lot of the shops and things there would normally be to do were closed. We walked around and found a “u-center” which we assumed stood for university center and we went into a “Charlie Brown Café.” It was a cute place, obviously Charlie Brown themed, but we were the only white people in there (besides some British people that were asking directions) so, strangely it didn’t feel like a tourist spot. We split a coffee and a piece of cake and went back to the hotel around 11:30.

Day 5:

We got up, checked out of the hotel, and went to the Beijing zoo to see the giant pandas. The zoo was pretty gross. The pandas were really cute though, but they weren’t as “giant” as I imagined. The zoo was just all-around depressing and the pandas looked really sad. One was actually pulling on the bars trying to escape. After the zoo, we went to the bird’s nest (Olympic stadium) and water cube. The birds’ nest just made you want to participate in physical movement. You could tell someone had gone out of their way to create an inspirational soundtrack to play. The songs were in other languages but I guess inspirational songs just have a certain sound to them. We had wheelbarrow races, built human pyramids, and other funny stuff. Nicky and I tried to do something that he apparently used to be able to do when he did karate where you hold onto each other’s ankles and somersault overtop of each other. It was NOT pretty, or successful, but it was pretty funny. We spent about an hour and a half in the birds nest and then some people wanted to see the water cube. You had to pay an extra $5 USD to see the water cube, and we only had about a half hour left so we couldn’t really hang out in there like we did with the bird’s nest. I didn’t really want to pay for it or rush around, and neither did Nicky and Katie so we just kind of hung out while everyone else went. After the Olympic stuff we went to another indoor market while we were killing time before the airport. Our guide told us that behind the market was a pretty nice mall and if we weren’t in the mood for shopping we could go to the Apple store or go out to eat or something like that. Me, Nicky, and Megan were really craving pizza so we found a pizza restaurant and ate there. People behind us were speaking English and we didn’t recognize any of them from Semester at Sea so we asked them what they were doing in China. Two of them were there for a year to teach English and one was visiting her sister. We talked to them for awhile about their program. The program they went through didn’t really seem like that great of a program, but the idea of spending a year there sounds really cool. If I could find a better program to go through, I would definitely do something like that. We left for the airport and flew to Shanghai where we got driven in a bus to the ship. It was weird to see the ship in a port that we hadn’t actually been there to see it dock in.

Day 6:

On the last day in Shanghai, me, Nicky, and Megan had signed up for a Semester at Sea trip called “Tasting the Daily Life of a Shanghai Citizen.” First, we went to a community center. It was kind of hard to communicate sometimes because they had a translator, but from what I could tell the center is free to those who want to use it. They have a lot of activities for adults there; we saw ballroom-like dancing and a choir. The people we observed seemed like they must go there a lot, because the singers were really good singers and the dancers were doing organized dances. Some of them pulled us in to dance with them and tried to teach us the steps. It wasn’t really ballroom dancing because it was a lot faster, but it had just as intricate of movements. I got the impression that the place was more for retired adults, but their retiring age in China is around 55. A lot of the people there seemed between the ages of my parents and grandparents, so they made especially funny dance partners. It was kind of hard to dance with them because they couldn’t really tell us what to do, but it was really funny. When we saw the choir, they sang some songs for us and then they wanted us to sing for them. All anyone could think of to sing was “you are my sunshine.” After the community center, we visited a kindergarten. The kids were really cute and told us their names in English and then sang some English songs, like “head shoulders knees and toes.” In one room, the kids seemed a little bit older, and some of them volunteered to do stuff by themselves. One boy sang a song and then said he was going to do a kung fu show but got too nervous. Another girl sang a song and halfway through you could tell she forgot the words. Her classmates started laughing at her, and she turned around and shook her pointer finger at them and yelled at them in Chinese. It was something I noticed A LOT of in China – even though people didn’t speak English, their mannerisms were so similar to ours that you could pretty much tell exactly what they were saying. This girl was saying something along the lines of, “shut up and leave me alone! YOU’RE not up here doing this! Just give me a minute!” We went to an acupuncture clinic and one girl volunteered to have acupuncture done on her hand, but it was hard to judge whether or not it was effective because she didn’t really have any ailments to complain about. I want to try acupuncture some day, but it cost about $3 USD to try it there and I didn’t want to pay to have one or two needles stuck into my hand and not really accomplish anything. One boy also tried “cupping” which is this weird thing where they heat cups with a flame and they suction to your skin and they’re supposed to suck toxins out or something along those lines and they leave really strange cup-shaped welts on your skin. The welts supposedly don’t hurt but it’s just a weird practice. Someone in one of my classes said he has done it in the USA for his allergies and that it actually helped a lot. After the clinic we stopped at a local market and all got snacks, despite the guides warnings that we shouldn’t eat because we were about to eat lunch. We assured him we would be fine and would still be able to eat. We were NOT fine. We went to a local woman’s house and she cooked us a huge meal. Except for maybe one of the meals in Beijing, it was the best meal I had the whole time, and it was SO MUCH FOOD. We all ate a lot but we couldn’t come close to finishing it. Even if we hadn’t gotten a snack at the market, we never could have finished this food. She kept trying to urge us (in Chinese) to eat more. We were eating off of one of those communal rotating discs, which I thought was interesting that they even have them in their own houses and not just at restaurants. At the end of the meal, we were all talking and some people were casually picking at food. I picked a few melon slices up with my chopsticks and ate them as we were talking. She was watching me do it and she picked up the bowl off of the disc and put it in front of me, like she wanted me to finish all of it. It was all slightly awkward because they made you feel kind of guilty for not eating, but it was a ridiculous amount of food. During lunch, I talked to a Semester at Sea employee for awhile about how she spent a year in China teaching English. She went through a different program than the people we ran into in the pizza place. Her program sounded a lot better and I really want to talk to her about it more before the semester is over. On the way back, we got the bus to drop us off on a popular street. We got a 30 minute foot massage for about $5USD. One girl that got dropped off with us from the SAS trip came with us and she got pretty intense with the massage people. Her masseuse kept checking her phone or having a conversation with someone else in the place, she started last and ended first, and she definitely got the worst massage out of all of us. She refused to pay the full amount of money, and it got a little awkward but it was really funny.

A few pictures...I wanted to post the video Megan took of me dancing with an old man but it would have used too much internet time:



The most confusing sign we saw at the Great Wall...what does this even mean?


Katie, Megan, Erika, me, Brian, Derek, and Nicky making a human pyramid at the bird's nest


me, Megan, and Nicky with the random Chinese people at the Forbidden City


Nicky, Megan, Jordan, me, Nikki, and Tom on top of Victoria Peak with Hong Kong in the background:


trying to somersault:
Nicky, Derek, me, Megan, Erika, and Katie on the Great Wall:


all of us with Tara doing a classic Chinese picture:

us all at the coffee shop that we FINALLY found on the first night in Beijing:

Megan and I doing a Chinese picture on the Great Wall:

Nicky and I getting double-Chinese on the Great Wall:

damn those speaking cell phones..