Advertisement
Cheers to communists!
Tiananmen Square doing the communist salute with Rob and Fei
I hope the guards didn’t see this! We lost Rob and Jason today at Forbidden City before lunch and we didn’t find them until they showed up at the bar on the river at 11pm! Every was soo worried and relived and lets be real, I’m just jealous that they got to eat scorpions and I didn’t! I’m now on a hunt to find scorpion! Apparently it was like bar food; salty and crunchy!
Today was amazing! For starters, I slept through breakfast not realizing that they expected me to eat before we left the hotel for the day. Boo. Anyways, we started at Tiananmen Square which was this huge open space with a monument (which looked like a giant phallic like the Washington Monument as Phil says) for the soldiers and another which symbolized the people pushing ahead the communist government. Along the edges of the square are the buildings where the communist party operates. They were some pretty intense buildings. What really surprised me about the square was the fact that there was only 1 food vendor which was on the far end of the square! Breakfast! I just had a Minute Maid orange juice since it was the only thing I could identify.
Me and Bret
This one's for Chuck! If we were in America there would have been a million vendors, I wouldn’t have gone hungry and there would be garbage all over the place. That is the other thing that impressed me; this place is pretty clean in the tourist areas yet I could never seem to find a garbage can. Little historical fact, Tiananmen Square is the largest square in the world and is the size of 16 soccer fields!! The only down side is no one is allowed to walk on the grass and if you get close to doing so, the soldier will start yelling in a heart beat. I didn’t test this out though; I wasn’t ready to jeopardize going to jail on the first day!
On the north side of the square was the south gates to the Forbidden City. This is the palace for the old emperor and the place is absolutely huge! The place is 5 mile by 5 mile block full of court yards after court yards and room after room. There are so many rooms in the palace that if you stayed in each room one night since the day you were born, by the time you slept
The Entire Group
All of us before entering the Forbidden City in every room once you would be 27 years old! We walked around the entire palace looking at the jewels and statues along with learning about the architecture of each. At the corner of each building there are mythological creatures that designate who can and can not enter the building depending on the ranks. That’s some crazy regulations! The Forbidden City also is layered 15 bricks deep done in crosses! During the Ming dynasty when the power was passed on by the king, he gave it to his nephew who he felt was the best choice and is other nephew got pissed off and an inter-family war broke out. In short, they were not sure if the pissed off nephew died or not do in fear of him digging a tunnel under the Forbidden City and coming to kill the king, they layered the bricks.
Let me point out my favorite thing about the Forbidden City. There are no shops or restaurants in the City unless they are for souvenirs but you know what they do have… STARBUCKS! I was in freaking paradise (as was many of my other classmates) and I had to run in and buy a
Forbidden City
Missy and Me kickin it before it started to rain Starbucks! I got in trouble for taking a picture inside but it was sooo worth it. That was defiantly my favorite part of the day! You know my trip wouldn’t have been complete if I didn’t go to Starbucks.
Throughout the morning I’d been talking to my roommate on the trip, Fei, who is one of our trip advisors who just graduated from ASU and is a Shanghai native. She was constantly complaining about how much she didn’t like how the communist government and how bad they were to the people. Did you know that people get executed for tax evasion? People get executed on a bus, which looks like a coach bus, on the spot without trial or anything! Fai said that at least 10,000 people are executed a year for tax evasion and murders and such whereas the U.S. only does about 2. Apparently the Chinese government says 10,000 but it is believed that there are many more. I can see how that would be.
Short: It started raining after the Forbidden City and us Arizona kids never see rain and pretty much tried finding cover anywhere we could…that’s when Rob and Jason got confused and
STARBUCKS!
I found Starbucks in the Forbidden City! My trip is now complete! followed the wrong yellow flag (our tour guide has been carrying a yellow flag) and walked off.
After the Forbidden City we went to lunch and that’s when we realized we lost Rob and Jason. Sucks for them! Haha, jk! They are pretty chill guys and they ended up walking all the way back to the hotel from the City which was probably a 2-3 hour walk at least! I ate my lunch with ease while they got to eat scorpion…not fair. I did have a lot of fun at lunch though; I got the chance to bond with a lot of the students. Everyone keeps walking in and picking up the end of conversations which had provided for some great entertainment during this trip!
Our bus rides have gotten crazy! Back seat crew (yes we have our group) is out of control. I think the best way to describe everyone is tea baging, jokes (which we are all going to hell for telling and laughing at), and a million of other stories of drunken nights and ignorance. It’s been a great learning about everyone and the millions of things they’d done in and out of college. To
Back Seat Crew
People rotate in and out
tea bag initiation! be completely honest, this trip is mainly honors kids and global studies kids and I expected it to be crazy nerdy and boring but no, everyone is wild!
(I need to throw this in) OMG, so the Chinese are crazy drivers right? Well, we saw a guy lying in the middle of the street and had just been hit by a car and there were people around him and there was blood and everything! It was so horrible! After seeing that I am NOT running across the street unless I’m sure I’m going to make it.
Anyways, after lunch we went to the river side and we got to hang out with the common people of China. We all got into carts that were on the back of bicycles and we rode around the area checking out the river side and all the bars that were called Budweiser and Heineken (and they were the real beers!) It was soo awesome. Me and Missy were together in the car with our driver Chao who grabbed her boob when she went to give him a hug goodbye at the end of our trip! She got violated haha! It was great,
Missy
Our bike driver, Chao, who coped a feel of Missy's boob...I got him to do the shocker for ASU! we were laughing about it for the rest of the day…she got action first out of all of us! Besides Missy’s boob action, we got to go into this local women’s house and talk to her about living which was so different that I’d ever seen before. The house was small with one light in each room and there was no bathroom in the house! There was a public bathroom which everyone went to in the center of the little area. Something that I found really weird was that when the people there go to the bathroom, they sit there and have a conversation with each other! The stalls are open and people just openly have a discussion! Ew! This place seemed like the ghetto of I dono what and these people are middle class!
After we left the homes, we went to a chic shopping district and we walked around for about an hour and a half. Brett, Missy, Sean, Kyle, Mike and Phil all went on the bunggy ball outside the sports center and drew a huge crowd! It was a ball that shot up into the air and Phil, whose scared of heights, went up screaming
Crazy Bike Drivers
These guys were crazy pulling us up and down these tiny streets and cutting people off. I thought we were going to flip at one turn! his head off every time the thing came back down! When he got off the ride is face was soo red and he was shaking like crazy…involuntarily. He walked it off when we went to this huge mall and we walked around a little. This place was 6 floors high and had a so many stores! I wasn’t even in a shopping mood, it was kind of depressing. We then decided to catch the bus back to the hotel so we booked it back to the meeting place and went back.
Once we got back we all washed up and then 19 of us got into taxi’s and went back to the riverside where we were earlier for dinner and bars. We were only able to get 4 people into a taxi so we took multiple taxis and ended up getting separated completely! We then ran into one other taxi group so we gave up on everyone else and went to dinner at this really cute restaurant. This was our first chance to order by ourselves and no one knew what to do so I grabbed the menu and ordered a bunch of food. Thankfully everyone liked and we
Bungy Ball!
Kyle, Mike and Phil screaming as they shoot upwards! got our beer so all was well. It was a nice change since it was a different type of Chinese food than we’d been eating so far.
After dinner we walked around a little and settled at this bar/club with a dance floor. We ordered some drinks and before long, Missy was drunk and dragged my butt to the dance floor. Not too long after we had a Chinese guy dancing with us! His name was Jerry, from New Jersey, works in pharmaceutical research and is here in China for two months before he heads back to the states. So being the nice person I am I get to know him and everything and then I go sit down with the rest of the group and he continues to ask Missy about me! I was completely oblivious to the fact that he was hitting on me! Haha, damn it, should have gotten a drink out of him! I made it back to the dance floor with Chloe, who is a Hawaiian belly dancer and was ridiculous out there, Missy and Liz and then all of a sudden we looked at the door and who should we see but Rob
Cool Sign!
I thought it was cool! and Jason! We all started screaming and ran to the door and started hugging them asking what happened and thankful that they were alive! It’s crazy how tight we’ve gotten in one day! So they came out and danced with us and Jason starts a dance off with these two Chinese guys who are in short ass shorts and t-shirts (they match each other!) and everyone just made a circle around the dance floor and it got wild!
After a while we all got tied of the club because it was a little pricy and we started walking around to the various other places. We then ended up at Budweiser bar on the roof top and we all ordered a beer. Many of us were so tired that we just kicked back and then we all jumped in taxi’s and went home and were back by 2am.
I guess the best way to describe today was exhausting. Everyone is so much fun and I think we’ve all got each other’s backs. Tomorrow is the Great Wall…I can’t wait!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.133s; Tpl: 0.062s; cc: 10; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0572s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.2mb
