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...
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| 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!
