Earlier in the semester, I signed up to do a waltz class with the students. I had no idea what I was getting myself in to. Each year, the school puts on this huge Olympic ceremony where all of the colleges within the university must participate in the activities. Turns out, my waltz class was to a spotlight dance for the opening ceremonies. So for over a month, we would practice our dance once or twice a week and a week before the event, we would be practicing almost twice a day. The opening ceremonies turned out to be a really cool event and I'm glad that I participated in them.
The week after we went to Chengdu, we had a three day weekend so we decided to go a further distance from Chongqing. We decided we would take a 12 hour train to see the Three Gorges area. So we departed at night and arrived in the afternoon the following day. This train ride was by far the most unpleasant 12 hours of my life. We were on a crowded train fighting for space in our small section where would we sit face to face with a stranger. With about three feet of space between the seats, the were was hardly any room to breathe. By some miracle I was able to fall asleep and woke up a few hours away form our destination. When we arrived at our destination, we made our way for the hotel and dropped our stuff off for the day and went to find things to do. We walked around for a little and decided that we wanted to see the new Captain America movie. Chinese movie theaters are pretty nice, they even give you free popcorn and drinks! After that, we walked around some more and called it a night and went back to the hotel. So we woke up early and went to the bus station so that we could go see the Three Gorges. The trip took about an hour and we went through a twisting road along the river to the ferry station where we would start to go through the gorges. We went with a tour group so we didn't have to worry about finding anything. We went down the river and walked through a village and then went and saw the 'Tribe of the Three Gorges'. This was an old castle like village built into the side of the mountain. To get to this area, we had to take a cable car up the side of the mountain. The trip was pretty cool, the amount of time we spent waiting and traveling made it a little less worth it. But it was still a cool weekend.
We decided one weekend to go to the Sichuan town of Chengdu. One of the students was familiar with the town so she came with us. We took the train and then stayed at a hostel for a night. It was a really cool trip. On our first day, we explored the downtown area of Chengdu and tried some of the local food. After exploring downtown, we went to the older part of town to see some historical areas. This district was inside of an old style square building and there were many attractions for us to see there. After this place, we went to a newer area that really comes to life at night. This area was also based in an older district but has become modern and packed with people. After a long day of exploring, we went back to the hostel so that we could rest and go to the Panda Zoo in the morning. When we woke up, we traveled about two hours to see the pandas. Unfortunately, most of the pandas were asleep when we were there it was still cool to see all of the panda exhibits and the other animals at the zoo. While the pandas were sleeping for most of the time, it was a really awesome weekend. I enjoyed seeing another part of China, I would definitely g
So it's been over a month since I've last posted and I found some free time so I'm going to do the best I can to make these good. I won't be able to remember everything but I'll post pictures so that you can all see what it was like at least. This place was an ancient fishing town in the center of the city. Really cool area. Lots of tourist attractions and places to have fun. I tried squid (could have been octopus?) on a stick, wasn't that bad. They had an area outside the village that was on the dried part of the river with food and lots of other attractions. The highlight of the trip was going into these adult sized inflatable things and playing in the water. After we did that and explored some more, we called it a day.
|