Vacation Time (part 2)

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Hey everyone,

For the weekend following our group trip to the villages and mountain, one of my friends and I thought a weekend trip to Beijing sounded like a great idea. So we bought our high-speed train tickets, about $80USD one way, booked a hostel, and planned to leave campus about 1.5-2 hours before the train left.

However, we miscalculated. First, we decided to make a quick stop at the store for some snacks to eat on the 5 hour train ride, so we left a bit later than originally planned. Then, we hadn’t accounted for the half hour walk to the subway stop, thinking that it was a lot closer from campus than it really is (we don’t ride the subway often here; there are only two lines, and they’re just perpendicular straight lines, so not super helpful. Buses are more convenient). Once we got to the subway, my friend had packed her water in her backpack, forgetting that the subway security here requires you to take out your water so they can scan it, so it took her a second to pull all three bottles out of the various pockets she had placed them in.

According to one of my friends, the subway ride to the train station is supposed to take about 45 minutes. In reality, it takes about an hour. So that definitely slowed us down. Once we finally got to the station, we weren’t really sure where we were going, and we were quickly running out of time. After a pause to ask somebody at the information desk where to go, we jogged up a few flights of stairs and to the high-speed train entrance, where we were confronted by yet another security gate. This one ended up confiscating my friends brand-new bottle of spray-deodorant, because apparently they limit the size of spray bottles allowed on the trains. That also slowed us down. At this point we were down to minutes until the train left, so we ended up jogging through the station trying to find our gate. We arrived at the gate right as the train was leaving, and they wouldn’t let us on. Luckily, we were able to go to a ticket window and have our tickets exchanged for free, and managed to get on another train leaving that day.

Unfortunately, the first train with free seats left about two and a half hours later, so by the time we actually got in to Beijing, it was 1am, and we didn’t get to the hostel until 2am. It was late. And I had to shower, so I ended up being the awful person who took a shower at 2:30am and woke everyone up (not that us walking into the room didn’t do that all on its own). The hostel turned out to be pretty grungy, so my friend decided she wasn’t going to shower there, since it grossed her out too much. I had no such scruples, and took my shower in the gross bathroom in the middle of the night.

The next morning, we woke up at 5am to meet up with one of my friends from Tacoma who had just moved back to Beijing. His cousin was nice enough to agree to drive us to the Great Wall, which is at least an hour outside of the city by car, or more by other means. At the Great Wall, the guys ended up turning back more or less right after we entered (the wimps), so my friend and I went up a ways ourselves to take some pictures and take in the view. We decided not to go too far, both because the stairs looked intense, and because we didn’t want to make my friend and his cousin wait too long. We did get lucky with the weather, because while it was cloudy, temperatures in Beijing were much lower than they were in Xi’an that weekend (think low eighties compared to about 104). Honestly, I love Beijing, and the best part of the weekend was still the relief of getting away from Xi’an weather.

After exploring the Great Wall for a bit, we ended up back in the city, ate some hotpot, sang some karaoke, and then had Japanese for dinner. All-in-all, it was a pretty perfect day. On Sunday, we woke up around seven and headed to Tiananmen Square to look around before catching our train back. We actually made it to that one on time 😉.

Following our weekend in Beijing, our program had a day trip to a cultural museum. Unfortunately, there’s not much I can say about the museum, since I spent the whole day either feeling very sick or in the bathroom (for some reason Xi’an food doesn’t agree with me—definitely didn’t have this problem in any of the other Chinese cities I’ve been to, but maybe Xi’an food is less clean, or is of worse quality… I’m not really sure). Anyways, I didn’t see much of the museum, so I can’t say much about it, although my friends tell me I didn’t miss much.

The day after, I went with a group of friends to 兵馬俑 (Bīngmǎyǒng - Terracotta Warriors). Getting there is kind of difficult, and as I said in the last post, I’m a bit salty that the program didn’t just take us, but we made it there in one piece and without being scammed, so guess it worked out. The soldiers themselves were really cool, and it was definitely weird seeing them in various stages of put-together. I never really thought about it much before going, but most of the soldiers and horses that they’ve excavated started out in broken pieces and have since been painstakingly put back together until they are as whole as the ones that we see in museums and in pictures. In some of the pits, we were actually able to see the broken pieces and the partially restored soldiers. Definitely worth a trip if you’re out in Xi’an, but not something that you would take the effort to see twice.

Well, that’s a wrap on the extra-long post covering the last few weeks. This week is our last, and I think I have one more topic I want to talk about before I write a final follow-up post, so keep your eyes peeled for that. The last two might come after I return home, since this week is shaping up to be extremely busy, and we fly out the morning after our final exam this Friday, but I will get it out, I promise!

Until next time!

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Photos

Monument to the People's Heros
Tiananmen

Even my American friends are Asian...
But of course we're all awesome

Archer
Archeologists speculate his bow an arrow were made of wood and have long since rotted away.

Roofs
The waves in the roofs (these have yet to be excavated, but there should be more soldiers and horses inside) are indentations left from logs that made up the roofs once upon a time but have long since rotted away.

Comments

[nancy]

Katie, What wonderful experiences you are having. I am glad your parents have instilled in you such a sense of adventure. Grandma McGee would be jealous. Good luck with your final exams and see you next time you are back in the states