Lions and Tigers and PANDA Bears!

(Kimmy, this post is especially for you!)

Spring has come to Beijing, and we have had more sunny, blue-sky days in the past two weeks than smoggy gray ones. (Though dandelion fuzz floats around in the air here like snow, so I'm extremely glad I'm not sensitive to allergies!) Last weekend, two friends and I took advantage of the beautiful weather by spending a day at the Beijing Zoo.

The Beijing Zoo, and also half of Beijing.

The zoo was a pretty nice place, not too big, with all the typical animals any self-respecting zoo would be expected to have: lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes, etc. But of course, this being the Beijing Zoo, they have one special animal that is not so common back home: the panda bear! Since none of the zoos in Chicago have pandas, this was my first time seeing them in person. The pandas are the zoo's main attraction, and there was quite a crowd gathered around to catch a glimpse of them, but I managed to squeeze through and find a good spot to peek in at them. Three of them were inside, munching away on bamboo, but one more active little fellow was outside on the jungle gym. We watched him try to fit his whole body into a tire swing, which he repeatedly fell out of, before giving up and climbing on top of the jungle gym.

And then getting tuckered out once he made it to the top!

We caught this guy in the middle of lunchtime

The zoo happens to be a popular place for Chinese tourists to visit, and many of these tourists seemed to be just as fascinated with us foreigners as with the animals. After several pictures were snapped in my face, I began to feel a little like an exhibit myself! (On a side note: Do you think I ought to start charging people who want to take pictures with me? I could probably pay for college that way...)

All in all, it was a fun day. And Kimmy, you may rest assured that pandas are just as cute in person as you would expect them to be, particularly when they are trying to shove themselves into tire swings.

Lost in Translation

Here in China, I have come across some rather interesting English translations. Sometimes, it may be just a matter of a small misspelling, though other times some of the translations are completely incomprehensible. Here are some of the best ones I've collected so far:

Helpful in case we have an emergency-o

He touched the bulp!

I'm not actually sure what's over there

We can also talk about the complete lack of green grass here

What kind of sandwiches are they making?!

Please, it's for your own safety

I think "giraffe" was the word you were looking for

Well since you told me not to...

Contrary to what the sign may lead you to believe, there was no juggling going on in this store

A funny oxymoron

I really think we should tell them about this one

If you step on it, does it become frowning grass?

Well that was inspiring

By the Sea

Our last and longest stop on the trip was in the city of Qingdao. Qingdao is a colorful port on the Shandong Peninsula, which strangely enough used to be under German jurisdiction from around 1897-1922. The German influence is definitely still apparent, and there are several streets lined with some pretty distinctive German architecture. In the Old Town of Qingdao, there was a large cathedral, as well as several blocks of German houses. Walking around that part of the neighborhood almost made me feel like I was back in Europe, not China!

We stayed at a really cool hostel in the Old Town, which actually used ot be an old observatory. It was located high on a hill, and the dome was converted into a cafe where we could eat, socialize, and enjoy the view (though sometimes it was too foggy to see much). We spent some time in the city, and one evening we went down to the harbor to explore.

Qingdao was where China hosted the sailing events for the 2008 Olympics, so there were some Olympic remnants around the harbor, as well as a lot of shops and restaurants. Around dusk, we found a nice little patch of deserted shoreline to wander around, take a few pictures, and strike some tai-chi poses before the tide came in.

In the evening we went to a bar where a live Filipino band was playing and spent a relaxed evening hanging out there. It was pretty late by the time we grabbed a taxi to go back to the hostel. We had to climb the stairs up the hill in the dark, and I was concentrating so much on not tripping that I almost had a heart attack when one of my friends suddenly jumped out at me from behind a wall trying to scare me. Needless to say, he succeeded!

 

The next day I slept in, ate breakfast in the observatory dome, and took the bus to Stone-Man Beach, so named for the big rock formation near the shore that apparently looks like a man. The beach looked very nice, but unfortunately the weather was still too cold to enjoy it much, so we only walked around a little before heading back. No spring break on the beach for us unfortunately.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, but in a good way since it gave me some time to catch up on some reading (and sleeping) that I missed out on during a hectic Midterms week. We headed back Saturday morning. Some terrible traffic turned what was supposed to be a seven hour bus ride into a ten hour one, but I had my comfy spot in the back of the bus again, and some friends and I did our best to keep ourselves occupied by watching movies, playing cards, and eating unhealthy gas-station-stop snacks. We were happy to see Beijing once again when we finally made it back.

And so ended my spring break trip. I am back in the routine of classes again and more busy than ever. The countdown to finals is just about five weeks and I still have so much to do! But I'm also looking forward to a lot more exciting things as well (I still have to see the Great Wall, after all)! So there will be lots more to come...

Indiana Jenny

The next stop on our trip was Qufu, the hometown of China's very own Confucius, or Kong Qiu as he is called in Chinese. We stayed at a cute hostel where everyone had a room overlooking a little courtyard, and there was a really nice common space where we all gathered to play cards and pool and watch movies in the evening. All in all, in was a huge step up from the previous hotel, and we were greatly relieved.

The main attraction in the town of Qufu is its Confucius Temple, the largest in China. It was built in 487 BC during the Zhou dynasty to honor Confucius. We visited it on the second day, spending the afternoon wandering among the complex of courtyards, shrines, pavilions, and giant cypress trees scattered throughout the temple. It was much less restored than a lot of the other temples I've visited, so it felt more authentic, in a way.

 

We also spent half a day at Yishan Mountain, a historic site which emperors used to visit to make sacrifices and convene with heaven. Supposedly great scholars would come to the mountain as well and leave all sorts of articles, poems, and inscriptions, so there's all sorts of mysterious wisdom floating around up there.

We hiked up the rocky hillside like intrepid explorers, scrambling over boulders and hopping crevices. There wasn't much on the hill that qualified as a pathway, so it was really up to us to forge our way up however we could manage. It felt like a maze, or some kind of intense obstacle course; At the top, we celebrated our successful climb by sprawling exhaustedly on a large, flat boulder which overlooked the surrounding area. A hazy fog had drifted in and hung in the air, giving the scenery a mysterious sort of feeling, which seemed appropriate given the mountain's strange history.

Imbibing wisdom

and sitting on giant rocks

We lingered a little too long at the top and managed to get ourselves lost on the way back down to the bus! After a lot of trial and error, running into dead ends and large boulders which we decided were best left un-climbed, we finally found a way down via a little dirt path that cut through the masses of scraggly bushes covering the hillside. Every now and then I would slip on the loose rocks on the pathway and start skidding down the hill. I'd come sliding right down next to my friends feeling like Indiana Jones or something (after I got done hyperventilating about almost flying off a cliff)! We made it back down to the bus without incident, congratulating ourselves on our feats of daring. I took a nap on the bus ride back because, frankly, being a daring adventurer is exhausting.

The evening was spent at the hostel playing Uno and several aggressive games of "Spoons," and we departed the next morning for Qingdao.

In Which Our Accommodations are Questionable

Thanks to my sluggish internet at school, my posts have been somewhat sporadic this semester. I've finally found a little cafe on campus which seems to have decent wi-fi, so I'm going to try to catch up and post all my recent goings-on in the next few days.

Just a week ago, I returned from our school's Spring break excursion to the Shandong province of China. Unlike Yunnan, this trip was only one week long, and we stayed in hostels in big cities instead of village houses, so it was meant to be a lot more relaxing! During the trip, we visited the cities of Tianjin, Qufu, and Qingdao.

We only stayed one day in Tianjin, and for that I was grateful because I wasn't much of a fan of the city or our hotel. Upon the elevator doors' parting on the fifth floor where our room was located, I thought we had accidentally descended to the basement instead. My friend and I walked hesitantly to our hotel room, which was squeezed into a corner of the building and very oddly shaped as a result, with several more corners than the standard four. We tried to ignore the peeling wallpaper and cracked sink, reminding ourselves all the while that at least we weren't paying for the accommodations, and escaped as quickly as possible to go explore the city.

Outside, the sky was as gray and bleak as our hotel room. Unfortunately Tianjin seemed just as polluted as Beijing on a bad day. We walked around, observing the unique, eclectic, (and occasionally just weird) scenery in the city: some tall buildings here, a few shopping streets there, a giant bronze clock structure over there...

 

Don't ask me...

When we got tired of wandering around the city, we returned to our hotel room, pushed our beds together (ignoring the piles of trash dwelling underneath) and had a movie marathon with four of our other friends who wanted to avoid hanging out in their rooms which were apparently even worse than ours. We were all pretty glad to leave the next morning. The upside to starting the trip out on a low note was that it could only get better from there!