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!