David: China Trip Day 6

**Sorry for the delay -- just took a little trip down to Keene State in NH to visit my homie Austin and his awesome friends.. so I have not been by my computer for a bit (which has been a good change of pace). But anyway, here's what has been goin' on on the other side of the globe.

Today was our last full day in Chongqing, and to start off the day we went to a Chinese middle school with kids ages 13-15. The minute we walked in we were swarmed... and this school has 6,000 kids so we were being treated like celebrities just walking through the campus. We were treated with a little performance done by the kids and then headed off to the basketball courts to participate in their gym class lol. All the instructions were confusing since the guy only spoke Chinese, but my new friends Zhang Shaosong and Xue Yongsong helped me out a lot to get passed the language barrier. After their gym class we headed off to check out some classrooms, which were so much different. I don't know if it was because we were there or not, but everyone is so much more interested in school over here lol. I asked some of them what they do in their free time and what I mostly got for an answer was studying. But I guess there isn't much else to do since this school was one of the best middle schools in Chongqing and the competition is crazy to get into this one. Just feeling welcomed home by English was enough to see that these kids were very well educated. After we said our goodbyes and left the school we headed to the Dazu Stone Carvings, which were carved 800 years ago. And these things were enormous lol, but the detail and perfection of every carving was amazing. We had a tour guide who spoke in broken English so it was hard to understand him... but what I did get was pretty interesting. Otherwise just looking at everything was enough. Once we finished our tour of the Dazu Stone Carvings we got on our 3 hour bus ride back to the hotel... which sucked. And that ended Day 6... Tomorrow Qufu.

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David: China Trip Day 5

Today was a bad day weather wise. It didn't stop raining, and on top of things it was our shopping day which was mostly outdoors lol. We started the day at the Three Gorges Museum, which was cool, but mostly everything was in Chinese so I couldn't read anything. We did get headphones and a little voice thing to listen to someone talking about the exhibits in broken English though. After the museum we headed to Ancient Street, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It's a cobble stone street with hundreds of different stores and restaurants lining the outside. We mostly ended up stopping and getting these fried dough pretzel like pastries, which I guess are really popular because there was a line passing 10 stores down the street (and this was all in the pouring rain). But other than that we stopped shortly at a few stores people pulled us into trying to sell us something, which happens every single time because we're foreigners and they know they can trick us into buying anything. After Ancient Street we went to Industrial Street in the business district of town. This was where all the normal stores you'd see in America were, but mostly high end like Burberry, Dior, etc. Didn't really have enough Yuan for any of those stores either so we moved on to dinner. And dinner was a pretty big cultural experience called the hot pot where you throw food into a boiling pot of hot spiced up water so it cooks fast and also burns your mouth like crazy because it's so spicy lol. But otherwise it was really good and wasn't too bad. When we finished with that we headed to the Yangtze River for a river cruise around the city. It seemed like every building had its own little light show going on with it and the whole city was lit up with different colors. It was cool to see everything from outside the streets though and get a sense of what the whole city looked like. And once we got off we headed back and that ended Day 5.




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David: China Trip Day 4

Today we left Beijing and flew to Chongqing, which has a population of 32 million people... yeah lol. We'll be here for the next 4 days and so far this city is like something straight out of some futuristic space movie I've seen. Everything is so much different than cities in the United States, but then again not many cities are as packed as this one. After resting for a bit at the hotel we went and checked out the General Stilwell museum (if you don't know anything about him check it out here). It was a really interesting exhibit and I learned a lot about Stilwell and the events during the time period he lived in. Afterwards we drove around town heading to our first dinner in Chongqing. We ended up going through a section of town which was pretty much a huge lively neighborhood with stores, restaurants, and everything on a small hillside. Once again some more stuff we'd never see in the United States... never thought one hill could hold so many people and places lol. Once we got to dinner we were all pretty much beat. We had our first experience with a whole fish at the dinner table too. Really was something picking all the meat off the fish when it's head is just there staring at you lol. But it was good so I can't complain. Day 4, yerr

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David: Gone to China!

Yes, the title is not a lie lol. Saturday, April 17th I'll be heading out to visit Beijing, Chongqing, and Qufu for two weeks in China. I'll be without a cell phone for awhile and the 12 hour difference will put me a day ahead, but I'll still try to keep up with the blogging while I'm away. I'm hoping to keep a little diary with pictures for everyone to see while I'm traveling overseas for two weeks, so everyone be on the look out! (if i have internet service while i'm out there of course lol). But regardless I'm extremely excited to be going and hopefully my new camera I just picked up last week will do me some good while I'm out there. Below are some pictures of the cities I'll be traveling to when I'm gone:

Beijing

Chongqing

Qufu

PEACE!!

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