And So It Begins, or China Part I

Hooray! I am finally caught up enough to blog about my trip to China! This is definitely going to take some time, so sit back, relax, and enjoy part 1.

First off, getting to China. This is not a lot of fun. In total we spent about 26 hours from the time we left my house to the time we got to our hotel in Xi'an. The flight from LA to Shanghai is about 14 hours and since we were getting there in the evening, I didn't want to sleep on the plane. About halfway through the flight, when I realized we still had another 7 hours to go I really thought I was going to have a panic attack, go crazy, or both! And let's not forget the food. Wow, airline food has a bad rep to begin with, but airline Chinese food? Really. not. appetizing! After our 14 hour flight we had a two hour layover in Shanghai. This was a really cool airport, but we were SO tired, and the airport was SO hot and humid. I wrote in my journal and then sprawled out across a bunch of chairs and dozed off. We were really looking spectacular by this point! After a two hour flight, we finally landed in Xi'an. Too bad it was still a 45 minute drive to the hotel! The next morning we went to the Cultural History museum. To be honest, I didn't get much out of this museum, we were all still pretty jet-lagged, and I think our tour guide took us there so we would shop in the gift shop, not so that we would see anything great! But, our lunch was a lot of fun, so that made up for it. We went to a restaurant and had hot pots. The first step in hot pots is to make your dipping sauce. This table was full of sesame oil, garlic, crushed peanuts, rose paste stuff, all sorts of interesting things that you mixed up in a little bowl to dip your food in. After you made your dipping sauce each person got their own individual hot pot. It was kind-of like a fondue pot with a broth in it that you would dip veggies, eggs, meats, noodles, etc. in. I think this was my favorite Chinese meal on the whole trip. It was a lot of fun experimenting with the different options on the table - although the egg was a little hard to fish out of the pot with chopsticks!

After lunch we went to the Little Wild Goose pagoda. You can't climb up in it because during an earthquake the building split apart at the top. Then, after a second earthquake it moved back together. So, not a very safe or stable building, but fun to look at.They also had this huge bell you could ring (for a fee of course) and a pretty cool statue garden.

After the pagoda, we went to the Star Fish Orphanage. This was a highlight of the trip. This orphanage is set up for children with physical or developmental disabilities. It was so much fun to play with the kids and hold the babies. We were all sad to go and wished we could have spent more time there. The orphanage is in a complex with some government sponsored buildings, including a retirement home. As we were leaving an older gentleman from the home was out for a walk. He said hello to our tour guide but either she didn't hear him, or was too busy trying to get us back on our bus, and didn't respond. He was LIVID! That was such a sign of disrespect. So, he planted himself in front of our bus and would not move! Our tour guide went out and apologized, our bus driver got out and tried to talk to him, the security guard from the front gate came over and tried to help, no one could get this man to move. Finally, after about 15 minutes of trying to reason with the man, one of the caregivers from the retirement home came over and was able to pull him away enough that our bus was able to maneuver around him. Again, he was LIVID, he started hitting and kicking this woman, trying to get away to stop us. What an interesting end to our afternoon - or so I thought. The interesting times were just beginning! I don't know if our bus driver thought he was taking a short-cut or if he got lost, but on the trip back to our hotel, we saw a side of China, I'm not sure we were supposed to see. We ended up wandering through the more rural, non commercial, non touristy areas. I'm surprised our bus even made it down some of the streets, at one point we had to reverse down the street because there wasn't enough room for our bus and the truck that was coming in the opposite direction. There were so many people out selling their wares on the sides of the street. I'm not sure many of them had ever seen so many tourists at once staring out at them from the bus! We had a blast waving from the windows and seeing who we could get to smile and wave back. Everyone was so friendly. I couldn't believe how brave people are there on the road, they would ride on their bikes right alongside the bus. There weren't any lanes, people would just all crowd in where they could. This woman was on her little scooter with her little boy riding on the back pretty much touching the bus as she went by - I took this looking down out of the bus window! The one thing that was sad to see was all the filth and poverty some of these people live in. We would drive past places that looked like they should be condemned, or areas that looked like garbage piles, and then you would see people living there.

After our interesting little detour, we had about an hour back at the hotel to rest up before we were supposed to meet to go over to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. They have a fountain and light show in the evening that our tour guide wanted us to see. It was pretty fun, but we were all still so tired, the minute it was over we were racing for the bus so we could go back to the hotel and go to bed. Up next, the Terracotta Warriors!