Xi’an Written by William November 23, 2013
Yesterday we went to see the Terracotta Warriors; my first impression was wow! They built
them 2000 years ago, and there are 8000 of them known. They are there to
defend the underground afterlife of one of the emperors. It took 700,000
people and 40 years to build it. They looked very detailed with every
face different, every armor different, and every shoe different. There is
something different on each one, and that is one of the things I thought was
really cool about them. We went to 3 different sites, and they all were huge.
We
went to an art museum and learned that Charles was born in the year of the
dragon, I was a monkey, my mom was a rat, my dad was a dog, and Miss Jenn was a
rooster. At the same place we learned how to do calligraphy; we learned how to
write dragon, love, forever, and our names in Chinese letters. We bought a few
paintings; the painting I got was of the Great Wall of China in springtime.
We
went biking on the wall the city of Xi’an. It was colder than cold; it was a
whopping 32 F or 0 C! I was lucky and had mittens; no one had either gloves or
mittens, so everyone was really jealous. The bad thing was that my hands were still
cold, even with my mittens on. Those were the downsides; the upsides were that we got to
see 18 soldiers marching...and that was the only upside. The most interesting fact
I learned was that their wall is wider than the Great Wall of China, which I
thought was pretty cool. After that we went on a 6-hour train ride to Beijing.
Written by Charles November 23, 2013 Xi’an
We
landed in Xi’an, and the first thing I noticed again was the pollution.
This pollution made Hong Kong look like a nature park. It was so polluted
that you could barely see the Air Traffic Control tower from the runway.
We drove an hour to the hotel, and I watched the movie Red October on the drive.
The next day we went to see the Terracotta Warriors. The Terracotta Warriors
are a clay army that protects the grave of the emperor. The amazing thing
is that each and every one of the 6,000 soldiers is molded after individual
people who all look different.
The
second amazing part is that people are piecing together 2,000 soldiers that are
smashed into hundreds of pieces. They got smashed because an army came
through and smashed them all, then burnt the roof of the tunnels. That
made ten feet of solid earth come raining down on them. The defending
army didn’t defend themselves that well! It took 400,000 people forty
years to finish it, just to be ruined 4 years after the completion. The
area of the main army is the size of 2 airbus A380’s. They put a hangar
over it and then started the work of piecing 2,000 clay statues together.
They are only putting 1/3 of them together because they are leaving 1/3 how
they found them, 1/3 are being put back together, and 1/3 are being left for
future generations.
There
were two other smaller hangars; one had the cavalry, and the other had the
generals/higher command. Also during that day, we went to an art museum,
which was cool. There were lots of traditional Chinese paintings.
We even got to write dragon, love, and forever in Chinese. Mine ended up
as big black blobs. The lady wrote our names in Chinese, and we found out
the Chinese calendar years we were born in. I found out that I was born
in the year of the dragon. William was a monkey, mom was a rat, dad was a
dog, and Ms. Jenn was an I forgot. There was some art that was on sale,
and we got some for the new house in Puerto Rico. (We moved a month before the
trip, just to add to the chaos.) In Xi’an indoors it smells like
cigarettes, and outdoors it smells like burning plastic. Also we tried to
post blogs here, but we weren't able to log onto the blog website. Ms. Jenn said it had to
do with the fact that there is a Communist rule here. She said that we
might not get to post anything till India. I hope you guys don’t go into
blog withdrawal.
On our
last full day in Xi’an, we did school because it was cold, wet, and
rainy. My mom and dad walked around outside in the morning. They
came back inside and said that we were the lucky ones. We took a
bullet train to Beijing in the afternoon. The train crosses half of China in just 6
hours! Before we got on the train, we rode on the old city wall that's
near our hotel. We rode ¼ of the 9-mile wall. It was so uneven and
bumpy that I thought that my arms would shake apart if the bike didn’t.
The wall was about 15-20 feet wide. We came to the next gate and saw
“army men”. They were really performers dressed as Ming dynasty
soldiers. There were sixteen of them. 8 marched up and around on
the walls; 6 stayed below and stood in formation. All the locals, not the
tourists, ran up to take pictures with them. I thought that the soldiers
looked funny with the big red feathers sticking out of their helmets.
After that William and I bumped into my dad for fun, and then we rode back. I
only wished for one thing then: gloves. It was close to 30 degrees, and I
wasn’t wearing gloves while bike riding. It was over soon enough, and
then we went back to the hotel.
Beijing Written by Charles November 27, 2013
The 6-hour train ride was interesting. I played on my computer with music trying to
drown out a man snoring/snorting. Every
time he snored, I cringed. There was also
this man who leaned over my chair to watch my video game. Finally 6 hours and 750 miles later, we
arrived at one of the largest cities in the world. With a population of 24,000,000, it makes New
York (8 million) look like a rural farmland.
Our hotel is the tallest building there, and we are on the 70th
of 81 floors. From the restaurant on the
80th floor, you can see Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.
On our first full day we went to the Great Wall! It took us an hour to get there by car. We went up a chairlift to a set of stairs
that led up to the wall. It was as you
would expect it: big. There were massive
mountains that were basically giant cliffs, and you could see the watchtowers
on top of them. The wall is narrow and
constantly goes up and down. Inside
every watchtower, it still felt like you were outside. The wind would blow through every door and
window. We got to go upstairs on one of
the watchtowers, and there were great pictures.
There were actually two other smaller Great Walls, but they fell into
ruin, sadly. The Great Wall covers half
of the length of the US! They restored
only some parts of the wall for tourists though, so most of it is rubble. After going down all the steps again and
getting attacked by grandmas wanting to take pictures with the American boys,
we got to the luge track. This one is
not like the one in Queenstown (golf cart track). This one could be the summer substitute of
the skeleton in the Olympics. Sadly
though, we didn’t go down headfirst.
About halfway down the track and right when I was gaining speed, I
caught up with the slowpoke ladies in front of me. If I had a horn, I would have leaned on it so
hard everyone would have gone deaf.
The next day we went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden
City. For the people that don’t know
what the Forbidden City is, it’s the palace that the emperors used to live
in. It’s called the Forbidden City
because the common people were not allowed in there. While walking through Tiananmen Square, it
felt like you were in an outdoor wind tunnel south of the South Pole. I mainly saw the ground while walking through
because you had to keep your head down, or else the wind would make you into an
ice sculpture. The few times I looked up
to see how far from the walls of the Forbidden City we were, I was amazed at
how they put up a picture of the worst Chairman/dictator China ever had. His name was Chairman Mao, and he killed
millions of people. My parents said that
most of the people in China didn’t know this and respected him for reuniting
the already united China. When we
reached the walls of the Forbidden City, I pulled out my camera to take a
picture, but the camera said that it was too cold to work! I felt the same way too. We went right through the palace and saw everything
from the royal gardens to the place where the emperor made speeches, to the
throne (well, I saw the corner of the throne because there were lots of people
looking at it) even to where the emperor slept.
The hallways through the different walls were wind tunnels. There were lots of colorful carvings and
paintings on the buildings. Honestly
though, we walked through about 30% of it, but I only saw 10% because of the
frigid wind. I think that you would get
a clearer picture of the place by looking at pictures on the Internet rather
than my description.
After the Forbidden City, we went to a silk making factory
and saw how they make silk. It’s pretty
easy; you just grow the silk
worms until they wrap themselves into a cocoon, and then you boil the cocoons to
kill the animals inside. All that’s left
is to take the cocoon apart and stretch it apart into the single strands. Then its like cotton, only a lot
smoother. My dad said that we could buy
one thing each. I didn’t choose anything,
but William chose a very expensive rug (before we knew the price). We all laughed and said that he has exquisite taste. My
dad said that is a no go, so he got a pillowcase instead. On our last day, we did school; then it was
the “weekend.” It was really Tuesday,
but we got to sleep in and skip school in the morning. When we went up to have lunch, we nearly
missed our flight. The elevator got
stuck and would only open about five inches.
William, mom, and I were trapped in there talking to the people outside
the elevator door. I was scared for
those five minutes because we were stuck in a metal box that we couldn’t get
out of, 80 stories above a concrete floor.
Finally the elevator decided to end its fun and let us out. Our flight
was in the afternoon, and it was almost a two-hour flight to Shanghai; it felt
like twenty minutes because I typed this on the plane.
Written by William November 28, 2013 Beijing
Well,
on the train ride, it was boring and long. The worst part was the guy snoring
in front of us; it was one of the worst sounds ever, if not the very worst. It
was so loud that I had to listen to music just so I wouldn’t hear him, but the
snoring was still very faint… so that helped, but not enough. About 5 and a
half hours later he stopped and got off the train, so we had a pleasant 30
minutes, and then we got off the train. When we arrived at the hotel, it was
dinnertime, so we told them about our Gluten free allergy. Luckily they had a G
for gluten free on the menu, which was a great relief because its usually hard
to find gluten free menus.
We
went to the Great Wall. We saw 8 turrets, but we could only go on top of one.
Luckily we got to see two cannons! And then we did a toboggan to get
down. It was familiar to me because I did it when I was 5 years old in Jackson
Hole, Wyoming. I went Mach 10. Sadly my mom and dad made us go back to the
hotel.
The
next day we went to a kung fu show. It was about a guy’s life. My description
was loud and amazing. People did head stands and other awesome and crazy
things. I thought one of the coolest parts were when they all did the same
movement at the same time.
The
last activity we did was seeing the Forbidden City, but first we had to walk
through a big square, which was called Tiananmen Square. It was freezing cold
and a big wind tunnel. There was a big picture of Chairman Mao on the side of a
huge building. When we went to the Forbidden City, I didn’t really know what I
was looking at because all I saw was a big building. There were some good
carvings in a big piece of marble, but that was it. I didn’t really see much
else that caught my eye, but my dad was pointing things out that weren’t too
interesting. The last day we were there, we got stuck in an elevator, which was
a first for everyone. We waited for like 5 minutes (but it felt like 15) while
we waited for the mechanic to fix it. Eventually the doors opened, and we got
out. I thought Beijing was a lot of fun, and I loved seeing the Great Wall.
Shanghai Written by Charles November 30, 2013
After the flight we landed and drove to the nicest hotel
ever. It beat Raffles in modern things
and niceness. After the first evening, it was Thanksgiving Day, and we did a Chinese cooking class. Before the cooking class, we saw where all the
locals get their food from the market. Everyone except
the local guide was grossed out. There
were lots of chicken and pig feet. There
was even a whole pig. We were all
freezing, and that was an automatic fridge for the vegetables. One side of the street/market was meat, and
the other was vegetables. There was every form
of meat, seafood, and vegetables. There
was a tie for the grossest thing; it was either the fish with its head cut off, but the fish was still alive and moving.
Or it might have been the lady hitting the fish in the head with a hammer, then stabbing it with a knife. It was
interesting to say the least. At the cooking class, we had to
not use half of the ingredients because they have gluten. I still deny that I have celiac's disease though. They called me over to cook something in a wok, but then they told me I couldn’t touch it.
I was upset at this, and then they told me that I couldn’t use the
butcher knife. That was all there was to
do basically, so William and I sort of watched them. I snuck in a few times and used the knife to
chop vegetables. The adults had to do
everything from fillet a whole fish to mixing raw meat with their hands. I considered myself lucky. In the end we had made fish/mushroom stew, a
spicy spinach salad, and pork on top of rice.
We ate like kings and basically rolled out of there, as luckily the food
market didn’t kill our appetites.
That night we had Thanksgiving dinner and an acrobatics
show. First was dinner at our hotel, and it was one of
the best I’ve ever had, same with the dessert.
Then we went to the acrobatics show.
My parents told me it was like a cirque du soleil show. I thought that it was awesome. There were people who folded into what I
thought were impossible shapes. There also was a man
who threw porcelain pots into the air and caught them on his neck. There were people who catapulted themselves on top
of other people using seesaws. There
were people who did tricks on a Ferris wheel, and they even carried
torches. My favorite part though was
when 7 people rode mopeds around inside a steel sphere. They did loops, spirals, and corkscrews. It was awesome looking in the dark theater
because they had lights on the bottom of the mopeds, and there were multicolor
blurs everywhere. Sadly we couldn’t take
pictures, but the name of the show was called Era, so you can look it
up. It’s awesome!
On our second and last full day we did school in the morning, and we walked around in the afternoon.
We walked next to the Bund River, and we saw the skyline of
Shanghai. Then we walked to the Old Town, where there were lots of old traditional Chinese buildings. When we walked down any street, at least ten
people swarmed us and asked us “Watch, you want watch, no, okay.” “Then bag, you want bag, no okay.” Then on a last vain attempt of giving us some
rip off or another “Suitcase, you want suitcase, no okay fine.” We walked past lots of shops, and just to add
to the confusion, the workers in the store would yell about all the things they're selling in their stores. We knew if a shop
didn’t yell at you, they had something illegal inside. For example, there was one shop with an entire
ivory tusk inside it. It was beautifully
carved, but I knew they had to kill the elephant to get it. After we got out from the mess, we went back
to the hotel. The next day on the ride
to the airport, we rode the Maglev train.
A Maglev train is a train that uses magnets to levitate and go at
hundreds of miles per hour. There was a
small board on the train that said how fast we were going, and I saw it get up
to 300 kilometers per hour! About halfway through, we passed the other Maglev train, and it was just a blur. I got it on film on the camera, but only three
frames of train, then it was gone. The
Maglev cut our travel time from 30 min in a car to just 8! It’s an 8 hour plane ride to Delhi, and then after
India, it’s off to Dubai!
Written by William December 1, 2013 Shanghai
That night we had an American Thanksgiving dinner at the hotel. When they were bringing the food out, we noticed it was coming on a cart. When they got closer, we saw that they had brought the entire turkey (head and legs included). It was really tender, and they also brought cinnamon cranberries. We called that our dessert, but we still ate the gluten free pumpkin pie. After dinner, we went to an acrobatic show. They started jumping through hoops around 3-4 feet high, and it seemed like they liked catapulting people off of seesaws and onto platforms. They also had 7 people on motorcycles driving around a steel sphere, and they were able to avoid hitting each other. I was wondering how many crashes those guys have been in. The show was amazing and impressive!
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