Pictures!

These pictures are kind of in a backwards order, but not like it really matters. I'll attempt to put some more pictures up on facebook at some point. Oh, and there is a video of me in the Shaolin Temple that I need to get on here soon too.

This is the Summer Palace in Beijing. It was kind of cold that day, but this was still one of my favorite places we went while in Beijing.

The Birds Nest. It was pretty stinking cool. And I took a nap on the field in there. :-)

The Great Wall... Need I say more?

This is the Forbidden City. The only people allowed in here were the Imperial Family and their servants until 1950, one year after the PRC was officially organized.

The Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an. They were built in order to guard the tomb of the first Emperor of China, Qinshihuang.

I belong in the 少林 Temple

Well, as many of you know, I just got back from a stinking awesome vacation. The whole study abroad group took a 10 day tour of 洛阳，西安，and 北京。It was way cool. There is really a ton of stuff that we did, so it's really hard to figure out exactly what I want to say about it. I would put everything on here, but that would be a stinking huge post, so I won't. But I will give you a run down of some of the highlights. Unfortunately, my batteries for my camera were being stupid for a large part of the trip, so my own photos are somewhat limited. But I will steal some from my friends at some point and get some posted on here eventually. Let's see, Luoyang was the first place we stopped at. That's where Buddhism first came to China. Therefore, most of the things we saw had to do with Buddhism. Included with those sites is the Shaolin Temple. Yes, that is correct, the birthplace of Wushu Martial Arts. It was one of my favorite parts of the trip. It was quite the site to see so many young people practicing martial arts. They were pretty intense. I kind of wish I could study there for a year or two. We did get to see a performance of the crazy things these Kung Fu Masters do. Then, about half way through the performance, they asked for 3 volunteers. So I, of course, had to volunteer. Being one of the only people waving my hand in the air wishing to be picked, not to mention one of the only white guys in the crowd, they decided to fulfill one of my greatest dreams and pick me to go up on stage with the Shaolin Monks. They had each of us mimic our "Master" and the style that they did. I ended up going last. My 师傅 did Preying Mantis Style. I will get a video of it on here, hopefully, within a week or so. Needless to say, I did pretty darn good. I have always wanted to do either Gymnastics or Martial Arts, and have never really had an opportunity to do either. So this was a dream come true. The crowed would have loved any white guy up there on the stage (you are automatically a celebrity when you go to China just because you are white). But the fact that I actually looked like I half way knew what I was doing, much less showed the other two guys up, just made the crowd go wild! It was great. My teacher told me that everyone gets their 10 min of fame and I probably just used about 7 of mine. And I am OK with that. I couldn't have thought of a better way to use them. :-)

Well, Xi'an was a really awesome city. There was a lot that we did there too, but once again, this post is already going to be nice and long, so I won't go into great detail about that. But Beijing was yet another awesome place to visit in China. Let's see, there was the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall, the Water Cube, the Bird's Nest and the list goes on and on. It is hard to choose my favorite part of Beijing. But the Great Wall was definitely up there on the list. The area that we went to was not a very busy area of the wall, and it was kind of a cloudy day and it rained towards the very end of our stay there. But because of this, there was virtually no one on the area of the wall that we were on for a majority of the time. It was AWESOME! There really isn't any way for me to accurately describe the Great Wall except for awe-inspiring. We did so much stuff that it is kind of hard to figure out what to talk about. So I think that I will tell more stories later, perhaps. But we got back home Sunday morning at like 9:00. And then we started back up with classes today. But luckily, tomorrow, I only have 2 hours of class. So I shall enjoy that immensely. I hope that you are all very jealous of me, and soon I will upload some pictures so that I can be sure that you are all jealous of me. :-) More updates later!

"Preparing" for Midterms

I don't like tests. But what I like less than tests are studying for them. So how do I manage, you might ask? I am after all a college student. Isn't taking tests a big part of college life? 没错! Testing is, in fact, a big part of college life. Little quizzes, or weekly tests aren't a big deal. So long as I pay attention to class and take notes, I usually remember the information needed to pass a small test. But what about Midterms, or Finals? Those are considerably more work and to be quite honest, a lot more stressful than a little quiz. 这倒也是. My first semester at BYU I found a very useful way of dealing with the stress that accompanies such big tests: I get a good, preferably thick, book, sit down and read it. No, not a text book, just a good novel or something of the like. I would enjoy going out with friends, but they are all busy stressing out over a test. Besides, I don't normally have the time to just sit down with a good book. So what was the book of choice for this round of stress? The Other Side of Heaven. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. It is absolutely amazing! It's especially fun for me because it reminds me of my mission in some ways. Mostly just his feelings towards the people of Tonga remind me of how I feel about the Chinese people. He gives some of the wonderful insights that he had on his mission, and some after his mission as well. I have been learning so much since I have been here in China. Not just about China or the Chinese language, but about myself and what I have in store for the rest of my life. It has been such a great experience. Sorry, no specifics at this point. If you are curious, I would be more than willing to share some of the insights that I have had and feelings I have had while being here with you one on one, but I didn't really feel like it would be very fitting to post a lot of those things on here.

On a slightly different note, I'm taking off later today with the rest of the Study Abroad group for a 10 day tour of 3 of the Capitals (ancient and current) of China. We will first be headed to Luoyang, where Buddhism was born in China. It is also the location of the Shaolin Temple and the Longmen Grottoes. Then we will be heading to Xi'an, which was where Qinshihuang first unified China. He is also the one who, when he was buried, instructed terracotta replicas of his army and their horses and chariots to be buried with him. So we will get to see the Terracotta Warriors, among other things while we are there. Then we will be heading to Beijing. The Great Wall, The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Olympic Venues... The list goes on and on. I'm so excited. It will be so much fun! I'll be sure to post plenty of pictures and let you all know how it goes!

450 Jiaozi

Well, here's a little story from when I was on vacation in Yangshuo...

Well, the whole group had just gotten back from one of our day excursions and we were all hungry. So we decided to go get some shui jiao's, or jiaozi's, how ever you prefer to call them. I'm not a huge fan because there was one transfer on my mission where I ate shui jiao nearly every day for the whole transfer. Needles to say, wo chi ni le (I can't handle eating them too often any more because I ate too many of them, man Chinese is so much more convienent than English). But that's where everyone was going, so I had to go with them. We went to Dumpling Dynasty (jiao zi is a Dumpling in English). They said that one serving is 10 jiaozi. There was about 14 or so of us, so we decided to get 50 jiao zi total. Well, not long later, they brought up a plate full of jiao zi. We all stared eating them... Then came another plate... It was looking like a whole lot, and by the time they brought up the 3rd plate, we realized that we had obvously had a misscommunication. There was WAY more than 50 dumplings. So as they brought the 4th plate in, we told them to stop and realized what had happened... Who ever was over on the other side of the table ordering had ordered 50 servings, not just 50 dumplings! So that meant that they were going to bring out 500 dumplings! We had them stop there where they were and realized that we had about 450 jiaozi sitting on the table in front of us. So everyone ate as much as we could. Then when we were all full, we started forcing ourselves to eat more. I'm not going to lie, there were are few of them that got thrown out the window... but it eventually turned into a game of us vs. jiaozi. The other guys were set on finishng all 450 of them. I was perfectly fine with wasting them all. We did end up finishing every single one off (excluding the few that flew away and one or two that may or may not have ended up in a tea pot). But in order to get them all gone, it was like a drinking game where everyone took a turn shoving one more nasty, cool, slightly rubbery jiaozi into their mouth and trying to get it down before the rest of them that we had eaten came up. It was quite the experience, to say the least. And to top it all off, when we split the bill, it came out to about 40 RMB a person (just under $6 USD). Normally, I am able to keep all of the money I spend in a day under 30 RMB, and most meals I only spend between 5 and 10 RMB. So I spent 4x more than I normally do on one meal for something that I didn't really want to eat in the first place. But, hey, I'm in China!

Guilin and Yangshuo

Well, I got back late last night from celebrating China's National Holiday.  We got out of school for a whole week.  So what did we do?  We took off to one of the most beautiful places in the world:  Guilin and Yangshuo.  I was only able to go thanks to two of the most awesome people in the world, Vivian and Stephanie.  Thank you both for helping me get there!  We left Saturday afternoon from Nanjing on a 20 hour train ride down to Guilin.  It was actually a pretty fun ride.  There was a group of 10 of us that all traveled together and did most of everything together the whole week.  So when I got to Guilin, I was totally impressed with how beautiful it was...  Then the next day, we went to Yangshuo.  Unfortunately, it was dark when we got there.  When we woke up the next morning, however, I was totally blown away with the beauty of the place.  We went up on to the top of the roof of our hostel just to take in the beauty of it all (that being the first picture).  The first full day in Yangshuo, we rented bikes, biked through the most gorgeous country side ever to the Yulong He (He is pronounced somewhat like huh and means river).  There we swam for a while waiting for our bamboo raft which we floated on for an hour or so.  We got back on our bikes and went to Moon Hill, hiked up there and then took a minivan to a mud cave.  We were so wiped out by the time we got back home that day!  But it was totally worth it!  My batteries died one the first day there, so I'm going to have to steal pictures from others before I can post them on here for you all to see.  We just haven't had a chance to swap pictures yet.  The next morning, we all got up early for a river cruise on the Li Jiang (jiang also means river).  The scenery, of course, was breathtaking.  Shoot, there is so much that we did that it's all getting muddled up in my head.  We went night fishing, or more of watched these way cool birds swim in front of a bamboo raft who would dive down and catch fish for their master.  It was pretty darn cool.  Of course, there was some bartering, I bought myself a bamboo scroll with the Dao De Jing on it for about $7 USD....  Awesome...  We rented scooters and took off to some more amazing places.  We went to this little village.  Basically we just had the time of our lives hanging out with friends in one of the most beautiful places in the world.  I don't really have much time left, so ask me more questions when I get back home about everything I did, and I'll be sure to give you all the great details.  Aren't you jealous!?