SarainHangzhou

This past weekend we had a three- day weekend courtesy of our teacher to allow us to travel to places that were far away from Hangzhou. All 10 of us American students decided to travel up to Beijing for the weekend. It was amazing and I wish we had more time there because there is so much more that I would like to see there! We left Thursday night on the Z Train which is 16 hours long and is overnight. We boarded the train at 6:30 on Thursday and got into Beijing the next day at 10:30 am. The train was not that bad, we bought economy tickets which meant that we didnt get beds in a sleeper car and had to sleep in out seets. It really wasn't that bad and I got the ... read more

As this weekend comes to a close, I figure that it would be a good time to look back and reflect on it. Yesterday we went to one of the malls in Hangzhou, it was 9 floors high! And that is the smallest of all the malls in Hangzhou. Apparently the largest has 4 seperate buildings. Building A has normal clothes, Building B has luxury items, Building C is full of restaurants and building D is a compilation of all of them. That is insanely crazy! We had a lot of fun browsing the stores and shopping, even though most of them were insanely ridiculously priced! I did find a shirt that I liked for a price that was very good, even by US standards. After that, there was a small salon in the mall and ... read more

Today was pretty much business as usual, except for the fact that we had a birthday today! A few people went out to one of the cake shops near the school and bought a really nice birthday cake and we had a nice birthday celebration for him. In Chinese culture, birthdays are celebrated by eating noodles so for dinner we went to a place that served noodles (which I was very happy with). You get the long noodles to symbolize longevity of life. After dinner, we all came back and ate cake to celebrate his birthday and watched a movie. Since we are studying in China (and we all have a secret love of Disney movies), we decided that Mulan was quite an appropriate movie. We all hung out and had fun while trying not to ... read more

Today we all woke up very early, (about 4:00 am here) and treked out to watch the sunrise over the mountains. We climbed up to the top of one of the mountains that is nearby the school and watched the sun over the horizon. It was very cloudy today and so it was hard to see and take pictures of, but it was still an absolutely beautiful sight! We're hopefuly gonna go up again another time when it's not so cloudy out, but it made us all really tired so we'll have to see when that happens.... read more