About Me

Greeting strangers! If you are reading this right now you most likely fall into one of these categories: family, friends, teachers, or fellow Juniata College students. If you are not one of the above by whatever misfortune or luck you have stumbled upon a college's student study abroad experience in China. Please stay and enjoy. My name is Jasun. Now to interject two disclaimers. One, this is my blog and I will speak my mind and sometimes, unfortunately, this may cross your comfort's threshold - and for that I apologize. Two, as much as this blog belongs to me, I am writing for you. As such, if there are any questions (I mean any) that pop into your head that you want answered just send me an email at Moyjf08@juniata.edu and I'll answer it on this blog. One more thing. I can't seem to upload pictures here. So I will most likely be uploading pictures on my facebook account. If you are interested in seeing these pictures and are not a facebook friend by all means add me - just leave message saying something of the sort that you follow this blog if I do not know you. Best wishes throughout the year, and I hope together we make it a fun, educational, and safe year.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

First Expedition

Sorry for the delay, but it has gotten quite busy on my side. Because of constant nagging and some advice from my father I will try and give you all more frequent but shorter posts so to keep you up-to-date in my life. But without further ado, I want to take you back to my Sunday night on October 3rd because this is the day when we started our excursion inside inner (central) China – to Yinchuan. What follows is a short itinerary of the week of October 3 to 8.

October 3rd:

7:26pm – we take a train from Dalian to Beijing

Because, unfortunately, there is no land bridge connecting these Dalian and Beijing the train must go around the small piece of water between these two cities resulting in a train ride of about 13 hours. Luckily, we took soft sleepers (or first class) so at least had “soft” beds to sleep on for the trip over. I suggest to anyone coming to China to travel by train at least one so that you can experience real China. No one but foreigners and the very wealthy ever take planes so I say travel authentic. Also, if you travel by day, it is also a nice way to see China.

October 4th:

Approximately 6am – we arrive in Beijing and travel hastily from the train station to the airport to catch our 10am flight from Beijing to Yinchuan.

Sometime around noon – we land in Yinchuan. We head towards the hotel to unpack and then get lunch

Lunch was interesting…there were ups and downs. Starting with the low: we ate some sort of animal’s (I think it was lamb/mutton) leg/foot – it tasted horrible. The high, however, was this delicious tea called babao cha (eight treasure tea) which was super sweet and did I mention delicious.

After lunch we went to our first site the Western Xia Tombs (or pyramids). Yeah weird, I know, I didn’t think pyramids were in China either. But eventually, once I get around to these pictures you’ll see that I’m not lying. It was a fairly short day because everyone was tired from a long day of traveling.

October 5th – 7th:

In between these days we like five or six different attractions in the surrounding areas. First we saw two different Buddhist temples – one was actually Tibetan. Then we went to the 108 pagodas (built in the Xixia period). Next was the great wall. This was pretty cool because it is near the Mongolian border so the wall was actually in use there. It is also not an official site, so the wall isn’t renovated and we got to see it in its original condition. Next heading to ancient troop hiding caves (I believe in the Ming dynasty). We got to actually go and travel into the tunnels very cool and scary because they are huge and contained hidden traps incase the enemy ever found the caves. And lastly, we traveled to the Tenggeli desert. This was probably one of the more interesting experiences because well I’ve never been to a desert before. We even got to ride camels! And then we got to eat them! Haha, not exactly, but we did eat camel meat. It tastes very similar to beef.

Then on October 7th we had train tickets at 4:26pm from Yinchuan back to Beijing – another long trek by train. First-class still, so it was at least comfortable. We arrived at Beijing at around 11am the next day.

October 8th:

We spent what was left of this day in Beijing. We went and saw all the traditional sites: the imperial palace, and then Tiananmen Square, the Silk Market, and some tourist street that sold exotic foods. What I’ve found out about Beijing is that days in Beijing are extremely short and quick, in part because of travel time, but just be prepared that either you can’t do everything you want or you’ll rush through things to get to the next site.

Then it was back home we go. With our plane taking off at 9:25pm we all sat down in our seats exhausted from a long week of traveling and a long day in Beijing and took quick nap before landing in Dalian.


Done. On to the next topic: this weekend. Tomorrow early in the morning we travel to rural China to some farm to huck corn and pull up squash and other vegetables and basically live the life of a poor farmer. I’ll let you know how that goes sometime after we get back.

1 comment:

  1. I'm impressed with your writing and descriptions. You sound like you are getting a great feel for the country. I can't wait to hear about farmer Jasun!

    ReplyDelete