China, Day 3 & 4: The Summer Palace

The Tower of Buddhist Incense, Longevity Hill and Kunming Lake
I went to the Summer Palace twice. The first time, I went with Sarah on Wednesday, the day we got back from Xi'an. It was cloudy and overcast all morning, started to drizzle on the ride and then began to pour as our taxi arrived at the gates to the Summer Palace. We bought tickets anyways, hoping the storm would blow over, but were forced to abandon that idea once it started lightening. Sarah and I tried to wait out the worst of the storm under a covered walkway, but after half an hour, we decided to just go get lunch.

The first taxi we saw was black, not the normal color for a Beijing taxi, but the driver assured us he had a meter, the puddle we were standing in was lapping at our ankles and there were no other taxis in sight. It wasn't the time to be picky. We got in, made sure our drive flipped on the meter and then, maybe ten minutes into the drive, I noticed that the meter was already at 100¥, more than double what the much longer taxi ride from our hostel had cost. We demanded the driver pull over. He refused and said this was the normal price. We pointed out that we had taken a taxi TO the Summer Palace, so we knew how much it actually cost and also, PULL OVER. He ended up turning off the meter and driving us to the nearest subway stop, which was decent of him, considering it was still pouring rain.

We ate lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant and ordered an obscene amount of food, including four different dishes of hummus. Mmm, hummus. Then I bought Korean World Cup stickers at an Art Box. In China.

I drug Mom and Leah back to the Summer Palace the next afternoon, once Sarah had left for the airport. Our first stop, after we walked past some halls of various beatitudes, was a name calligraphy booth. Artists would write western names using different Asian-esque pictures to represent each letter. (There's a video [not mine] of the Summer Palace calligraphy here.) Leah had her name written and I lamented that none of the letters in my name are depicted with a dragon.

Our next stop was Kunming Lake. Kunming Lake covers two thirds of the park and is surrounded by bridges, pagodas, pavilions, temples and gardens. It's absolutely gorgeous. When I was at the lake the day before, I could barely see through the rain, but on Thursday the storm had temporarily driven away the smog and haze, and there were brilliant blue skies. We rented a paddle boat and went out on the lake. Mom, who had a broken foot, sat in the front of the boat while Leah and I did the heavy lifting in the back. The lake was full of boats and the paddle boats don't exactly have a sophisticated steering systems, so we kept running into other boats. Luckily, paddle boats also don't go very fast and most of the collisions were avoided by Mom leaning forwards and pushing the other boats away.

The Tower of Buddhist Incense, perched on Longevity Hill overlooking Kunming Lake, is the highest point in the Summer Palace. We climbed to the top of the tower to get a view of the lake and the park. The Summer Palace is big enough that by the lake, the trees and hills hide the sprawl of Beijing surrounding the park, but from the top of the tower we could see the city spread out in front of us. It was definitely worth going back a second time.


Lotus blossoms at Kunming Lake


The Tower of Buddhist Incense


Decorated eaves on the Tower of Buddhist Incense
The rest of the pictures are here.

China, Day 4: The Mao-soleum

(Subject line courtesy of Sarah and The Rough Guide to China)

When I was in high school, I saw Discovery Channel special about mummies. It mostly overlooked Egyptian mummies and focused on European bog bodies and the Chinchorro mummies of Peru, but there was also a section on the mummification of modern politburos such as Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Mao. Lenin is so well preserved that even eighty years after his death, his body is still squishy! (I am many things, but squeamish isn't one of them.) Look, mummies are just generally awesome, but I'm especially fascinated by the modern ones.

Mao's mummy is laid to rest in Beijing, and there was no way I was visiting China without paying my respect to the Chairman. Sarah and I went on Thursday morning before she left for the airport. The mausoleum is large building in the middle of the of Tiananmen Square, a mere ten minute taxi ride from our hostel. We stored our bags at the luggage check and joined the line to enter the mausoleum. Even though we were at Tiananmen Square by 9:00 in the morning, there was already a long line snaking around the mausoleum. We waited for at least an hour, but the line was constantly moving and before long we were past the metal detectors (our second metal detectors, since we had to go through a metal detector just to get into Tiananmen Square) and the florist booth selling flowers in memory to the Great Leader.

Mao is housed in a crystal coffin. His mummy is a rather distinctive orange hue and he clashes with the red Chinese flag covering him. We can't even be sure we saw the real Mao; there is a wax model of the body which is sometimes displayed in place of the real chairman. We shuffled past in less than a minute and emerged into the bright sunlight of Tiananmen Square.


The Mao-soleum

China, Day 2: Xi'an and the Terracotta Army

The travelogue continues! The trip to Xi'an is one of the more crazypants things I've ever decided to do. When Mom and I booked our tickets to China, we planned to spend five days in Beijing and five days in Shanghai. I asked Leah what she most wanted to see in China and she immediately said the Terracotta Army. I have also wanted to see the Terracotta Army for approximately forever, but it's 750 miles from Beijing. Not exactly a day trip. Or is it?

Enter Sarah. Sarah decides she is going to China and we have the following conversation in a ten minute break between classes:

11:34 AM
Sarah: how close are the terra cotta soldiers?
me: um, fairly far away
unfortunately

11:56 AM
Sarah: um
so I totally want to see the terra Cotta army
apparently it's only and overnight train ride away
I'm totally up for that

And like that, I decided that maybe going to see the Terracotta Army was something I should seriously consider. Clearly, I'm easily suggestible if I already want to do something. (I was already planning to go back to China over Chuseok just to see the Terracotta Army, but I would rather go with someone. China can be intimidating by yourself and if I go by myself, I have no one to make excited seal noises to.) I shot off a quick email to my mom, letting her know I was going to Xi'an for a day (on a family vacation, no less) and inviting her and Leah to come along. They thought it would be fun. And like that, we were going to Xi'an.

The plan was to take an overnight train to Xi'an, spend the day at Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor (home to the Terracotta Army) and then take an overnight train back to Beijing that night, essentially treating this like a 1,500 miles (2414 km) daytrip. (It also meant two and half days without showers, and China is hot in August.) Ca-ray-zee.

Guys, it was so, so worth it.

We left Beijing on Monday evening from the Beijing West Railway Station, the largest train station in the world. Sleeper trains to Xi'an were four berths to a compartment. We booked our tickets through our hostel, and the travel agent was only able to buy top bunks, meaning we were separated into two compartments. Luckily, there was an Austrian group in the same situation, and we were able to switch berths and end up in one compartment. The sleeping cars were nice, if small. Bedding was provided and there were two bathrooms (which quickly ran out of toilet paper) at the end of the car. I was lulled to sleep by the rocking of the train in the suburbs of Beijing and woke up to sunrise in Shaanxi province.

The Terracotta Army was amazing! The army was built from 246 BC to 210 BC by Qin Shi Huang, who unified warring city-states in the Yellow River basin and became the first Emperor of China, to help him rule another empire in the afterlife. It was buried when he died in 210 BC and rediscovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well during a drought. The sheer scale of the necropolis is staggering. There are an estimated 8,000 soldiers guarding the tomb, and in addition to the soldiers, there are horses, water birds, musicians and acrobats awaiting the Emperor in the afterlife. Only three pits of soldiers open to the public, but dozens of other pits have been excavated and there's a really excellent museum full of the finds. There's no AC in Pit 1, which is really just a glorified air craft hanger, and it was sweltering hot, but we still spent hours walking around the army until our clothes were plastered to our bodies. Well, Sarah and I did. Mom and Leah abandoned us to play cards in a gift shop.

We stayed at the Mausoleum until closing time, then caught a bus back to Xi'an. We made the mistake of getting on a local mini-bus instead of the tourist bus that goes directly to the train station. They cost the same, but the mini-bus has a much longer route and there was a tense twenty or so minutes as we stared out the window and tried to figure out why we kept seeing fields and not a train station. We just barely made it back to Xi'an in time to catch our train back to Beijing.

The trip to Beijing wasn't quite as pleasant as the trip to Xi'an. We weren't able to switch bunks for the ride back, so we were in different compartments. Also, Mom and Leah found out the hard way that you *must* show your train ticket before exiting the arrivals terminal in Beijing. Sarah and I had our tickets, but Mom and Leah left theirs on the train. Mom blustered her way past the guard, but Leah, who was prone to getting stuck places on this trip, lacked Mom's gall and was detained, so Mom went back to wait with her. Sarah and I tried to pass Mom and Leah our tickets, but we were caught and the guard started ripping everyone's tickets so they could only be used once. Someone eventually gave Leah an extra ticket and she made it out, but Mom was still stuck. Eventually a guard took Mom back to the train to search for her ticket, but due to the language barrier (we spoke no Chinese, they spoke no English), all I knew was that Mom had been taken away after pissing off the guards in the Chinese train station. I spent the thirty minutes Mom was gone freaking out about how we hadn't even be in China for 48 hours and ALREADY someone had managed to get arrested or detained or whatever, what am I going to DO and, oh God, Mom has Leah's passport, I can't even take her back to Korea with me. Luckily Mom reappeared waving her ticket before I started contemplating calling the Embassy.

We escaped the the train station, caught a taxi to our hostel, and I took the best shower of my life. It was an awesome trip!






There are many, many more photos and more information that you could possible want about the Terracotta Army at my Flickr page.

China, Day 1: The Olympic Park

We left Seoul and flew into Beijing on August 2nd. We were meeting up with my friend Sarah and leaving Beijing that night, so the first few hours in China were a bit crazy. We needed to go the train station to store our luggage, we needed to have our tickets to store our luggage, we needed to find Sarah who had our tickets, we were at the wrong train station, etc. etc. Around and around we went, and it was 2:00 by the time our luggage was safely stowed and we made it to the restaurant for lunch. In addition to Sarah, two other friends from high school were also visiting Beijing at the same time (it's a small world after all), and we all met for lunch at a pizza place near Wendy and John's hotel. It was great to see them again, and so strange that we should all happen to be in Beijing of all places.

After lunch, Wendy and John left to see the Temple of Heaven and Mom, Leah, Sarah and I went to the Olympic Stadium. My brother is a huge fan of the Olympics, and Mom wanted to visit so she could tell him about it. Leah and I wanted to visit because we knew it would kill him just a little to know that we had been and he hadn't. (We're sisters, not saints.) Sarah came, I think, because the Water Cube has air conditioning.

I moved in the middle of the 2008 Olympics and missed pretty much the whole thing, but even I know what the Bird's Nest looks like. It was cool to see in person, all post-modern and grandiose. We spend twenty or so minutes walking around the stadium, dodging groups of Chinese tourists. I was surprised that almost two years to the day of the Opening Ceremonies, there were still hundred of tourists at the Bird's Nest. Of course, I would quickly learn that this is China and there would be hundred, if not thousands, of Chinese people milling about everywhere I went. Wikipedia tells that the Chinese government plans to turn the Bird's Nest into a shopping mall and hotel, but for now it's just a tourist destination.


Next to the Bird's Nest is the Water Cube. Part of the complex has been turned into a water park (which officially opened a few days after we visited) and much of the upper levels has been devoted to gift shops selling official Water Cube merchandise, but we eventually found the pool where Michael Phelps won all the gold medals ever. The pool was delightfully air conditioned, there was a video showing the highlights of the 2008 Olympics and we had an hour to kill before we left for the train station, so we camped out by the pool for the rest of the afternoon. Not a bad start to the trip!

Home!

I'm back from China! I flew into Seoul on Wednesday night with over a thousand photos, quite a lot of new jewelry and an impressive array of bruises.*  I knew I was home when I saw two giant advertisements featuring Kim Yu-na before I even made it out of the airport. I went back to the airport yesterday morning to drop my family off and managed to get stuck on the Incheon Bridge for over an hour when my bus broke on the way home. Because of course it did. I've spent the past two days holed up in my apartment, trying to go through vacation photos (the terracotta soldier photos just won't end) and discovering that post vacation/house guest laundry is easier to accomplish when you have a dryer.

My plan is write a travelogue about the trip and upload my pictures to Flickr, but I have never successfully finished a travelogue for any vacation longer than four days, so we'll see. (I always start one, but I usually get bored and quit after day four or five.) I do have a solid week of desk-warming to work on it though, so hopefully I'll at least get to the part where my little sister got locked in my bathroom for an hour or my mother was briefly detained in a Beijing train station. FUN TIMES!

*I might have fallen down a flight of stairs.**
**And by "might have fallen down a flight of stairs," I mean I totally fell down a flight of stairs. Face first. Sometimes I'm not so good at walking.

[July, July, July // it never seemed so strange]

The spring semester ends on July 16th, which means I have two weeks of class left. Even less actually, since the end of the semester if rife with tests (yay, only one day of actual teaching next week!) and fact that the last period of the day has been canceled due to unknown reasons for the rest of the semester. It would have been nice to know in advance - I could have rushed the axed classes through the last lesson, or at least said goodbye to students I won't see again until September - but that sort of forewarning is asking an awful lot of a Korean school.

I could not be more ready for semester to be over. The kids are restless and ready for vacation to start. They're also far more preoccupied with their upcoming national exams than they are with Lesson 8: What Will You Do This Summer. (My favorite answers so far come from 6-5 class. One rather rotund little boy plans to eat 100 ice cream bars. Another simple wants some meat.) (That being said, I was super proud of my 5th graders today. They're normally highly unmotivated and well, not very bright, but I was trying to explain why "Let's go baseball" and "Let's play swimming" are incorrect. We ended up doing some brainstorming on the board and a decent number of students realized without being told that "Let's play..." was used when talking about games or musical instruments whereas "Let's go..." was used with locations or the present participle and I actually got examples that hadn't been used in class and just, that's a big deal. It was one of those moments where I could see the students understand the lesson and actually learning, and those moments are few and far between, especially with the 5th graders.)

I also had my last after school class last Thursday, which is probably for the best, since I had completely given up caring. I made the world's weakest attempt to teach comparisons, said "Oh, fuck this," half way through and gave the students a word search. And then we watched part of School of Rock. Between being sick and the classes being a joke in the first place, I just could not bring myself to care last week.


Not going to miss the classes. Am going to miss play time with 3rd graders.
Once the semester ends, I have two weeks of English camp. Last year I was ~super~ stressed out about the camps. This year, I'm far more confident in my ability to BS a lesson plan in the half an hour before class starts and subsequently way calmer. I will also have one of my regular co-teachers teaching with me, which means I'm not responsible for ever single facet of the camps myself. In fact, I'm so calm, I've yet to even begin planning. My co-teacher and I are going to the bookstore to buy textbooks for the camps tomorrow and I'll spend my days off next week writing up the lesson plans, but in general, I'm not worried.

Then, once the camps are over at the end of the month, my mama and little sister are coming to see me! We're going to spend a few days in Korea, and then hop over to China for ten days - five days in Beijing and five days in Shanghai! I am all sorts of excited about seeing (half) my family for the first time since February and getting to show them around Korea, and also going to China. And, of course, visitors from home means they can bring me things from home! Tell me, does anyone have any thoughts on the best way to transport hummus on an airplane?

[with a flair for old romantic // to the Orient he flew]

Hey, remember back in February when I went to China. And then said nothing about if for month and month and months and waited like three weeks to even take the pictures off my camera. Yeah, here's my extremely belated China recap, complete with pictures. (Just a warning, but this comes in at 2,500 words, which is ridiculously tl;dr. If you just want pictures, they're here.)

I arrived in Beijing on Monday morning after a short flight. My guide book mentioned that there are public busses from the airport to Beijing, and since the airport is way outside of town and I have this "thing" about being cheep "independent" in foreign countries (I would say it's a side effect of living in one, but I was this way long before I moved to Korea, so I think the most accurate term is "stupid"), I decided "what the hey?", showed my hotel reservation to the woman at the ticket counter and jumped on a bus, with the idea of taking the bus to near my hotel and catching a cab the rest of the way. I was the ONLY white person on the bus, which earned me some very strange looks, but I did make it to the correct stop. I hailed a cab and showed them my hotel reservation, only to have the cabbie point to a building across the street and drive off. I assumed he meant that was my hotel, so I cross the street. It wasn't, so I hailed another cab, only to repeat the process. In the end, I went to eight different cabs before I found one who knew where my hotel was and was willing to take me to my hotel. It was only the start of my adventures with cabs in Beijing. (I never did figure out what they were pointing at. My hotel was close, but in the opposite direction.)


PLA soldier on guard at Tiananmen Square. Groups of PLA soldiers were probably the most common site at Tiananmen Square. I felt sorry for the poor guy. He had to be freezing.
Once I checked into my hotel, I went to Tiananmen Square. I know next to nothing about Beijing, but in 8th grade I read a book called Forbidden City about the Tiananmen Square Massacre and, of course, I've seen pictures of the giant portrait of Mao. Tiananmen Square is HUGE. No really, huge. It took me a good fifteen minutes to walk across it and once you see it, it's not hard to believe that 100,000 protesters could gather there. I wanted to visit the National Museum of China, which borders Tiananmen Square, but turns out it was closed this year. My guide book snarkily commented that it was often closed while the curators redefined history according to party line, but Wikipedia tells me that it's being enlarged. Either way, it was a disappointment.


Qianmen Gate forms the northern border of Tiananmen Square.
I walked around Tiananmen Square for half an hour or so. Especially during my first day, Beijing strongly reminded me of Seoul. They are both large East Asian cities with too many taxis and not enough trashcans. There's a huge amount of cultural influence between the two countries in terms of fashion and etiquette, and as ethnic groups the Chinese and Koreans look very similar to my untrained western eye. Both cities were extensively renovated during the 20th century and share certain historical architectural similarities as well. Take the Qianmen Gate, which looks an awful lot like Namdaemun and Dongdaemun in Seoul or Paldalmun in Suwon. Of course, the illusion came crashing down whenever I tried to read a sign, hail a taxi or figure out what was going on. I'd forgotten how disorienting being illiterate is.


A stone lion stands guard in front of Tiananmen Gate. This is an attempt at an artsy shot. I'm trying to be more creative with my framing.
My plan was to visit the Forbidden City my first day, but it closes at 4:00 during the winter and I spent too much time trying to hail a taxi to my hotel and walking around Tiananmen Square. By the time I made it to the Forbidden City, they were no longer selling tickets. Instead, I spent an hour or so browsing the shops near the Qianshi Hutong. A lot of people I met in China told me they came specifically for the shopping, but I wasn't a big fan of shopping there. Being yelled at by an old Chinese woman because I don't want to be ripped off buying a knock off Louis Vuitton that I don't even want in the first place, Jesus Christ I was just walking past, leave me alone isn't my idea of a good time. I decided to make it an early night and headed by to my hotel around five. I had no problems taking the subway back to the general area, but oh my GOD did I get lost trying to walk from the subway to my hotel. I walked around the area for close to an hour trying to find the damn building. At one point I ended up at a different subway stop and had to hop back on the subway to get back to the right general area. I finally caved and tried to hail a cab, but I could not get a cab. All the cabs were either full, wouldn't stop or the driver shouted at me in Chinese when I showed him the card for my hotel. After an hour of getting more and more lost, I finally ran out into traffic, hopped in a cab and refused to get out until the driver took me to my hotel, which is what I should have done in the first place, but that's now how you catch a cab in Korea and there AREN'T cabs in rural North Carolina, so I was a bit out of my element. I ended up being lost for nearly two hours and it made me a bit gun shy about relying on cabs for the rest of my trip.


The Hall of Supreme Harmony at the Forbidden City


Each of the great halls had giant copper pots in front. They would have been filled with water in case of a fire. This is the handle of one of those pots.


The center dragon of the Nine Dragon Screen. There were gilded screens decorating a lot of the buildings and walls. This one was near the entrance to one of the private gardens.
On Tuesday I headed back to the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City was the imperial Chinese palace for nearly five centuries. Construction of the current complex began in 1406 during the Ming Dynasty, but there has been an imperial palace on that site since Beijing was a Mongol city known as Khanbalikh and Marco Polo visited. The Forbidden City is HUGE. It's the world's largest surviving palace complex, and has 980 buildings covering 720,000 square meters. I ended up spending over five hours there. The first part is the public part of the palace. It's all grand architecture and halls and gates. Then there is the private section. It's where the emperor and his family and the court actually lived. There's a whole set of rooms dedicated to the lives of the emperor’s concubines. It's mazelike; I got lost several times while I was there. The Forbidden City was quite cool, even if I had lost all feeling in my toes by the time I left.


Taxis at Tiananmen Square. They DID NOT want to stop for us. I really missed the Korean idea of taxi stops.
On Wednesday, I went to the Great Wall of China with my friend Tony and Christine. Tony and Christine are from Korea. Well, they're from Canada and America, respectively, but they live in Korea, which is how I know them. Tony teaches at the elementary school closest to mine and we met on the bus. They were in Beijing the same time I was (we booked our tours through the same company) and we all thought it would be cheaper and easier to visit the Great Wall of China as a group. Christine called me Tuesday night and after several hours of playing a completely unnecessary game of phone tag, we decided to meet at 7:00 Wednesday morning by the flagpole in Tiananmen Square. I was late, as usual, but I still ended up waiting nearly thirty minutes for them to arrive. Arrive they did, however, and we started our quest to the Great Wall of China. I'm glad I waited, though. The trip would have been much more difficult without them.

There are three main sections of Great Wall near Beijing: Badaling, Mutianyu, Simatai. Badaling is the section most people visit since it's the closest to Beijing, but it's also heavily reconstructed (only the base is original; the rest of the wall was built in the 1950s). The Mutianyu and Simatai sections are older, less visited and more authentic. I'm a snooty purist when it comes to my crumbly ruins (I wanted them crumblier, dammit!) and Tony's friend had visited and raved about the Simatai section of the Great Wall, so we decided to go there. My guide book said it was possible to take a bus from Dongzhimen station in Beijing to Simatai. Since it was previously established I'm adventurous when it comes to transportation in foreign countries, Tony speaks pidgin Chinese and we were running low on money, we decided to take the bus. We took a taxi to Dongzhimen (and ha! trying to catch a taxi at Tiananmen Square was a nightmare), but couldn't find the bus terminal. We finally flagged an expat on his way to work and explained that we wanted to catch the bus to Simatai. He told us he'd lived in Beijing for four years and had never heard of someone taking a bus to Simatai. Then he pointed a collection of buses parked along the side of the road (with no terminal or building in sight) and told us that was the Dongzhimen bus station, but maybe we'd be better off hiring a taxi for the day. We considered the likelihood of us getting horrible lost in the Chinese countryside, decided we just weren't that adventurous and headed back to Tony and Christine's hotel.


The Chinese countryside as seen from close to, but not quite there yet, the Great Wall of China. That was one steep climb up.
The concierge also suggested hiring a taxi for a trip to the Great Wall and quoted us the ridiculous price of 1000 yuan. 1000 yuan is about 146 USD, which is about right for hiring a private taxi for the day in the US, but we weren't in the US. (Quick aside, a bunch of the westerners I met raved about how cheep Beijing was, but since I was spending won that had been converted to yuan, not dollars converted to yuan and the won to yuan rate isn't nearly as good as the dollar to yuan rate, I didn't really find China that cheep.) Plus, we didn't have 1000 yuan. My debit card was stolen in Bangkok and my replacement one hadn't arrive before I left, so I just converted what I thought was a sufficient about of won at the airport. It would have been a sufficient amount if my hotel hadn't taken half of it as a deposit, and while I had extra won with me in case of an emergency, it was back at my hotel. Tony had blown through most of the money he had converted and was also suffering from a SE Asia debit card robbery, and Christine was just flat broke until her paycheck was deposited in her Korean bank account that afternoon. We ended up combining all our money and bargaining with the concierge until he accepted that price. We still ended up getting ripped off, but not quite as much and hey, I got to go to the Great Wall of China.


[all along the watchtower // princes kept the view]
We ended up not going to Simatai. Large portions of that section were closed off due to a recent snow and we decided to Mutianyu instead. The Mutianyu section is one of the best-preserved parts of the Great Wall of China. It was first built in the 6th century during the Northern Qi Dynasty, but was rebuilt in 1569 during the Ming Dynasty. It was AMAZING!


Taken once I finally - finally - stepped onto the Great Wall of China.
It was a long hike up to the Great Wall, and we made it worse by accidentally going to longest and steepest way. It, in all seriousness, took almost an hour to make the hike and only part of that is because I'm out of shape. I would have made a terrible barbarian invader. Seriously, I would have taken on look at the Great Wall of China and said, "No seriously, you expected to climb that mountain AND deal with angry Chinese soldiers towering above me. Screw this; let's go drink some fermented yak milk." And then Ghengis Khan would have killed me, so it's a good thing I'm not in a Mongolian horde. We were greeted at the top by an old Chinese woman selling beer, and we toasted making it to the top.


[we could have gone all the way to the Great Wall of China // if you'd only had a little more faith in me]
We spent an hour or so hiking along the Great Wall. It was largely deserted, but we did run into a few people. There were two guys from Victoria who were CONVINCED that on one side of the Great Wall was China and on the other side was Mongolia. Christine asked me if that was true and I shook my head no. The guys assured me that yes, it was in fact Mongolia on the other side. They know this because they watch South Park. You read that right: someone just fact checked with South Park. Christine and Tony were looking confused (and I'm a pretentious little know-it-all and I really hate it when I hear people being wrong), so I pulled out my guide book, flipped to the map and showed them the Great Wall of China and Mongolia and how they weren't actually close. I came very close to giving a little speech about how the current borders of China are a modern (and contested) invention and when people talk about "China" in a historical context, they are referring to people who identified as Chinese, not people who lived within the current borders, so when you talk about historic Mongolians and historic Chinese, it has very little to do with the modern countries of China and Mongolia. And then I shut my mouth, which is a sure sign that I'm GROWING as a PERSON.


[we could have gone all the way to the Great Wall of China // now all you're going to be is history]
In addition to spreading scurrilous lies about geography, the two Canadians told us about a toboggan ride down from the wall. That's right: instead of walking down the mountain, we could take a wheeled toboggan on a winding metal track from the GREAT WALL OF CHINA to the parking lot. Dude, that's awesome. Of course we decided to, and it was actually loads of fun, even if it is a desecration of a historic monument. We stopped at Houhai, a lake in Beijing known for its nightlife, for dinner and some shopping before heading back to our hotels. I left the next morning and was home by mid afternoon.

[I took the first fast boat to China // and Jimmy there's still so much to be done]

So, hi! I'm back from China! I climbed the Great Wall of China and stood in Tiananmen Square and wandered through the Forbidden City for like, five hours, and got MIND BOGGLINGLY lost trying to get back to my hotel one night. And now I'm back in Korea, where I can figure out how to communicate with people (even if I can't speak much of the language) and read the street signs and all is good. :)

I still don't have a working computer, but I should pick it up tomorrow. I did find an Apple repair center in Seoul, and on Saturday Christine helped me drop it off. My hard drive is mostly likely busted, probably as a result of being HIT BY A CAR. Yeah, I got hit by a car. Korean drivers are CRAZY and a guy running a red light hit me when I was crossing a cross walk. It's at least part my fault, since I've been here long enough to know that a walk light doesn't mean it's actually safe to walk. Luckily, the driver was able to almost come to a stop and while I went sprawling, I was able to stand up and walk away. Unluckily, my computer was on me when it happened, and I doubt it's a coincidence that two days later it stopped working.

[what the hell did Marco Polo think // when he ran into the wall]

How to book a trip to China in five quick steps:

Step 1: Last Thursday I sent Sarah an email saying:

PPS. I kinda want to go to China next week, but I feel like that's ridiculous, since I've only been back for like two weeks. But, but. China.

I don't have class the last two weeks of February (end of term break) and I was dreading two weeks of sitting in my office and reading lolcats. Plus, China! It's practically next door. It has a Great Wall! Of course I want to go to China.

Step 2: I happened to see Tony on the bus that afternoon and I mentioned that I wanted to do something during the break. He told me he and Christine, his girlfriend, were going to China the last week of February. They had found a good deal at a travel agency near their home. I asked if anyone at the agency spoke English (Christine is Korean American, is fluent in Korean and thus has some options open to her than I do not), but alas, it was Korean only. I said bummer and went along my merry way thinking clearly, it wasn't meant to be.

Step 3: That evening, as I was getting ready to meet some friends for dinner, Christine called and offered to translate for me at the travel agency. Christine is quite awesome.

Step 4: I went to the travel agency with Tony and Christine on Saturday. We (and by we, I mean Christine and the travel agency woman, with a little input from me) discussed prices, hotel locations and visas. The good news: for 570,000 won ($400) I can get my plane tickets, a swanky four star hotel and my visa. The bad news: the visa alone is 150,000 won ($100). The good news: dude, a trip to China for $400. That's a really good deal. Two goods to one bad. The goods have it! I'm going to China.

Step 5: Today, I went back to the travel agency to pay and hand over my passport for visa processing. It's always fun to hand over a large bag of money. (The largest bill in Korean currency is a 10,000 won note, so 600,000 won in cash is quite a large stack of money.) I leave next Monday. I'll being in Beijing from February 23 to February 26 and I'm staying near Tiananmen Square. I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet; obviously I want to see the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, but if anyone has any suggestions, that would be great

(And in less joyous news, my father's having hip surgery right about now. It's nothing major, just replacing part of his already artificial hip, but the last time he had a hip surgery, it was life threatening and really, it just sucks beyond measure to be 7,000 miles and 14 hours away from home right now. I'll wake up tomorrow to an email from my mom telling me everything is fine, but any spare prayers or good vibes for my family would be much appreciated right now.)