Second Field Trip of China

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Tuesday night, we all decided to head down to West Lake. About 10 of us took taxis down to West Lake to walk around and enjoy the lake at night. The lights of the buildings reflecting off the lake was beautiful. In addition to the scenery of the lake, they had a water show in the lake. It was so cool to watch. They had it choreographed out to 3 different songs. The first two songs were Chinese songs, but the third was "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic, which made all of us laugh that Titanic was so popular that they were even using the music from it over here. It made me think back to when Breanna and I went to see Titanic 3D in Ames at school and almost the entire theater was full of Asian students.

Wednesday is Chinese culture day for us here at Zhejiang University. At 8:30 we had out first class which lasted an hour and a half. This class was all about Tai Chi and learning the moves and what they mean. It was a lot of fun, even though we had the class outside the International College building so we got a lot of people watching us make fools of ourselves. After that we had another History lecture about Hangzhou and Confucianism. It is really interesting to learn about the history of China since it has been around for so long and so many things have changed.

After the lectures, we got a break for lunch and then hopped on a bus to head out to the Grand Canal. The Grand Canal was build a long time ago and used for shipping between Hangzhou and Beijing. They are in the process of restoring the canal right now but it was still really cool to see. While we were there we visited the Grand Canal museum as well as a Chinese sword museum and a Chinese umbrella museum. They were all very interesting, but I wish that more of the objects were translated into English so that we could learn more about a lot of them.

We've been planning our trip to Beijing for next weekend, and it's all really exciting! We bought our train tickets to Beijing today, and have to go back tomorrow to buy our tickets to take the train home because those ones aren't on sale yet. We are also looking into hotels to stay in close to the Forbidden City so we can walk there and then take a taxi out to the Great Wall. It's gonna be an amazing trip, I can't wait!



Sara

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