Murali took us to see a big banyon tree about three hours' drive outside of Bangalore. There were monkeys everywhere. We also stopped to see the Big Bull Temple - legend has it that the bull (carved out of rock) started out so tiny it could fit in the palm of someone's hand, and kept growing until it reached the size it is today. [View Full Entry]

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Some of the parks around Bangalore, the garden city, and some snapshots of various aspects of rural, "modern" India. [View Full Entry]

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I got to see Bangalore for the first time...the place I'll be moving in a few months! [View Full Entry]

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Sophie and I decided to be kind of touristy during our last month, realizing there was still a LOT of Beijing we hadn't seen. We sang at our graduation party in our qipaos, and got a few last pictures of friends before heading back the next morning :( [View Full Entry]

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You may be surprised To find out I have eyes And I can stare too I’ll look right back at you But why don’t you care If I sit there and stare? Can’t you just go away? I just want one day Without stares no one cares what she wears or shares it with her friend on the bus And I can see How you’re looking at me I guarantee You’re not invisible I too Can see you stare At my hair Yes I know it’s not quite the same color At what I wear At least I don’t look like [View Full Entry]

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Go to the bust stop and take but 104 to tie shi zi fen, then cross the street to get to school. I thought the public bus would be an easy and mundane mode of transportation. I was wrong. After living in Beijing for eight months I am as capable as the locals at trekking through public transportation. If you think taking the bus in the morning isn’t worth mentioning, you might be surprised. In the morning I close the metal, double-locked door of my apartment and go through another gate to the apartment’s slow-moving elevator. Once I’m in the elevator [View Full Entry]

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We took the entire month of February off to explore Yunnan province in the south of China. It was warm, almost tropical, and a nice break from Beijing, which is at its coldest in February. We flew to Yunnan's capital, Kunming where my friend Julia met up with her grandmother before we set off in a bus. We went first to Lijiang, and stayed in a Naxi village called Baoshan. Our second night in Baoshan the villagers threw a bonfire, and helped us learn some of their traditional dance (lots of walking in circles around a fire), and we bonded with [View Full Entry]

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I had studied Mandarin for more than two months. I thought I could basically get my point across in Chinese, that is, until I got to a tulou in Chuxi. An old woman opened the door to my room and started talking - I couldn’t understand a single word. “Keke kaka. KEKE KAKA!” That doesn’t mean anything to me in any language. “Keke kaka!” she insisted. Then I had a realization: she was speaking Chinese and I was speaking Chinese. Somehow we couldn’t understand each other. I thought I was learning Chinese - Mandarin, but every town has its own dialect [View Full Entry]

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We took the train to Fujian province. We did a lot of hiking, and explored a Chuxi village and a village called Wuyi shan and lived with local families there. From there, we took the train to Jiangsu province, stayed with local families in their villages, and visited a lot of tea groves. We also visited a silk factory where silk is produced from the cocoons of silkworms, and the next day visited a steel factory that manufactured parts for machinery. Our last few days were spent in a town called Zhouzhuang, which consists primarily of canals, and has amazingly well-preserved [View Full Entry]

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Our Chinese teacher, Cheng Laoshi (程老师) invited our Chinese class over to her house for an afternoon. We all took the subway over, and went to lunch at a hot pot restaurant (she made us do all the ordering, to practice saying things like "we want chicken, but please don't put the head in the soup", and other useful phrases). We went to her house and met her 1 1/2 year old son, Shuai shuai (which means "handsome"...it's a nickname, as most Chinese kids have when they're little). He doesn't speak much, but his tones are already much better than ours! [View Full Entry]

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