Holidays in Hangzhou Spending my fall semester in Hangzhou has enabled me to experience so many new things, but it also means I am missing out on things back home. It’s been interesting to see the difference in holidays in China and home. The celebrations that I take for granted as obvious aren’t known here. And I am very ignorant of the holidays here in China. I’ve been able to get through Halloween without missing home too much, but once we get to Thanksgiving, I think I’ll have a harder time. We’re getting closer to the big American holidays. I’ll be home for Christmas, but I will be missing the whole Christmas season leading up to the actual day. In America, you experience Christmas as soon as Thanksgiving Day is over, or even before then. Everyone ... read more

Today we had our very last excursion; it’s a little sad, but the day was a collection of random events to make it interesting. We took a bus to Longjing Well which is a famous spring. The water is clean enough to drink from which is rare here. Then we walked to a nearby village where Longjing tea is grown. The valley was so pretty with the cute little houses and curvy road and the tea fields on the mountain sides. As soon as we entered the village, the villagers came out and offered us tea. “Tea? Tea? Ni yao cha ma? Hen pianyi! I give you good price!” We stopped at one of the oldest buildings in the village where Mao Zedong visited once and took a very serious picture at the table in front ... read more

Saturday we had a trip to the tea museum. Miss Li thankfully pushed the time back to the afternoon. We had all gone out the night before for Carey’s birthday (again) for some dancing and were glad for the chance to sleep in. The museum wasn’t bad, but I’ve been to a lot of museums this semester, so it wasn’t the most exciting thing. What was exciting was the chance to taste four kinds of Chinese tea. We sat at a table with a lady that showed us how to prepare each kind of tea, then we got to have a tiny cupful of it. We got to try Longjing, a well-known green tea from Hangzhou; red tea (black tea); a flower tea, we had jasmine with osmanthus; and oolong tea (ginseng). The oolong tea was ... read more

Exactly a month left in China. It’s a little weird to think that soon this will all be just a memory. I’ve gotten so used to living here; it may be stressful to come home, especially with all the hustle and bustle of Christmas. Despite my semester coming to a close, exciting things are still happening. We had a break from our usual two and a half hour business class when our professor took us on a walk to a park near West Lake. It was really nice because the area was so quiet; I almost forgot we were in the middle of a big city. We saw a few couples taking wedding photos, so that was fun to watch. Wedding photos here seem a lot more like a fashion photo shoot than just wedding pictures. ... read more

Sunday was our last day trip of the semester. We got up at 7:00 to take a bus to Shaoxing. Like Qiandao Lake, I was a little reluctant to go, but since this trip was required, I didn’t go through the same struggle. Our van driver was 45 minutes late which upset me because I could have slept that much longer. But Miss Li brought peanut butter sandwiches and oranges for us to eat, so I was appeased. We were going to see the home of the famous writer Lu Xun, but there were so many people there, we changed our plans and went to East Lake first. We walked into the park area, and the first thing we saw was a pond with big round bubbles floating on the water. We got closer and saw ... read more