Xi'an, China

On to the next lag of my trip to China - Xi'an (pronounced 'shee-ann')!! Xi'an is an old city rich in Chinese history. 1300 years ago, it was the original capital city of China and the starting point of the famous Silk Road. You could feel the difference compared to Shanghai just by driving through the city. It simply felt much older and you could almost feel the history in the air.

Here is a picture of one of the gates to get into the walled part of the city. The city wall is very modern compared to other parts of the surrounding area - it was built only 600 years ago! LOL It always made me laugh when they referred to various aspects of "more modern" construction because most of the "more modern" structures are more than twice as old as my country!

The city wall and various look-out towers are lit up at night and are beautiful! :)

As are the original Drum Tower and Bell Tower used to signal alarms and communicate with the surrounding area!

We hired a car, driver and guide for the day to take us to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and the Terra-cotta Warriors. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda was pretty neat. It stands just over 7 stories high and was built in 652AD by Buddhists to store their religious writings. There is still a functioning monastery on site with about 100 practicing monks. However, they now apparently all have cell phones and satellite dishes. Very different from the monks of the past! LOL This is a statue of a famous monk - Xuanzang.

So there's an odd legend for the origins of the name.....apparently there was a sect of Buddhism that used to eat meat. One day the monks simply had no meat so they prayed that Buddha would provide for them. Suddenly, as a flock of wild geese were flying overhead, the leading wild goose broke it's wings and fell dead to the ground. They believed Buddha had granted them their request, so they built a pagoda there and named the temple after it. Oh and they stopped eating meat after that too, the legend goes. LOL

I hiked all the way to the top to take a picture - awesome view! :)

The monks still light and sell candles for practicing Buddhists who visit the site to light and offer prayers to their Buddha idol inside the temple - you can kind of see it through the door.

This cool looking tree was just outside the temple on the terrace with the candles, so I snapped a shot of it. LOL

From the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, we drove another 40 minutes to the one of the coolest sites in China - The Terra-cotta Warriors! Personally, I think the Great Wall was THE coolest, but the Warriors were a close second! :)



Ok, the site is divided into 3 main pits. Between the 3 pits, there are over 8,000 statues. Pit#1 is by far the biggest holding 6,000!! Buildings have been built around and over the pits so visitors can view them and the air temperature can be controlled. It was REALLY cold inside Pit #1! It is HUGE!!!! I was stunned at the enormity of this pit. I had seen pictures of it before, but they really didn't do it justice. It seriously is ENORMOUS!

It really hit me what an undertaking it would have been to have all these statues made back in the day. They were built during the Qin Dynasty (246BC) to honor and protect the Emperor Qin Shi Huang in the after-life.

The channels were filled with these life-size warriors and then logs were placed overtop to protect them before being covered up with earth. They were modeled after actual soldiers of the time and no two are exactly alike! I loved looking at all the faces......they really are all different!

Pit #2 - Much has still not been unearthed yet, as they are waiting for technology to catch up before they take the buried warriors and horses out. Each of the warriors was painted in bright colors, but the color fades and completely disappears within 3-6 minutes of exposure to the air. The Warriors are impressive just as they are, so I couldn't imagine how amazing they would look painted in the vibrant colors they were decorated with!

Pit#3 - Is the most 'powerful' pit as it is a military command center. The highest ranking officials are only found in this pit as well as the honor guards. Emperor Qin didn't fool around when it came to strategically burying things! He was fully prepared to enter the after-life with all his men there ready to fight and protect.

The site was found only 36 years ago, when some local farmers were digging a well in 1974 and found broken "pottery". I actually got to meet the farmer who discovered this site, and he signed my book on the history of this place! :) We weren't allowed to take any pictures of him though and he couldn't speak English, so that was kinda funny. LOL Here's a picture of where the well was dug (by sign marked 1).....had they dug a few more feet back, who knows if they would have even known this massive terra-cotta army was there!

Here's a pic of the "Kneeling Archer". He is considered to be lucky because he was the ONLY member of the Terra-cotta Army that was found completely whole and intact without anydamage or broken pieces. The detail on the armor and even the shoes was incredible.....couldn't imagine how they were able to construct all these guys and how long that would have taken!

That's it on Xi'an for now! Onto Beijing........:)

Sites of Shanghai!

The bridge we crossed to get from the airport into Shanghai

Ok, my latest adventure to China started off by taking a 13 hour flight from Kuwait into Pudong International Airport in Shanghai, China! Bill, Joe and I had explored the desert months earlier and had talked about how cool it would be to travel to China and see some of the sites - 3 months later we landed in China with another teacher, Tom. He actually has a position next year teaching at a school in Shanghai and wanted to go and check out everything, so we decided to join him!

We stayed in Shanghai for the first 3 days and filled them with lots of walking and taking in what this booming city had to offer. Our first stop was the Yu Gardens Bazaar!

This is a more modern area, but was constructed using the old traditional style of architecture. While we were walking around, this sweet 77 year old man, Mr. Kong, walked up to us and started chatting.

Joe, Mr. Kong, Bill, Me and Tom

It turns out he was an English teacher for the past 30 years and had recently retired and spends his days walking around this area of town. He said he would love to show us around and was very adamant about doing it for free - he said he was just grateful to speak some English and have something to do! So he showed us all around the Bazaar and took us to a cool tea ceremony...

Us drinking our special types of tea!

...the silk museum....these are the machines that take the threads from the silkworm cocoons and unravel and wind them onto spools......I had no idea how this worked before! Super cool! :)

And this is an actual cocoon that will later be hooked up to the silk winder to be unravelled! Definitely bigger than I expected!

I was ecstatic to find a Starbucks tucked away down one of the streets! :)

We also took a stroll down the famous Bund, the heart of colonial Shanghai......but due to Expo 2010 opening up in Shanghai May 1st, it was all ripped up for reconstruction and renovations. We were disappointed, but I guess that's what happens when a world event comes to town!

Here's a dorky pic of me with the Expo mascot.....LOL!

This is one of the lions in front of the Shanghai Pudong Developmental Bank along the Bund. They say it's good luck if you rub the paws or head of this lion!

We spent one day at the Shanghai Museum, which was very cool!

They had LOADS of ancient artifacts on display and lots of old coins that had been dug up in more recent years. The statues outside the museum were really neat, as was the structural architecture inside.

The streets of Shanghai were very busy with lots of traffic, but what surprised me the most was that in a modern bustling city, there were just as many bicycles and carts being pulled by men as there were cars, taxis and buses!

While we were in Shanghai, we also had a chance to attend the Chinese Acrobatic Show. It was pretty amazing what some of these people could do with regards to bending and balancing! My favorite part was when there were 5 motorcycles driving inside this fairly small metal caged ball!

Because we traveled from Shanghai to Xi'an to Beijing to Shanghai, we had another day to site see in Shanghai at the end of our trip before we flew out at 11:30pm that night. We took a nice stroll in the People's Square park! Back in the day during the 1930s, it was a famous horse racetrack.......it has now been redone into a beautiful park. This is a pic of the infamous Park Hotel. Apparently during WW2 the Nazi's frequented this hotel and partied hard there!

The park itself is beautiful and is quite literally a breath of fresh air in the middle of the city!

On our way to the airport on our final day, we decided to take the Maglev - the Magnetic Levitation Train! It can run up to 430km/hour.......the fastest it got up to during our trip to the airport was 301 km/hour. It took 7 minutes to go the 30km distance! I tried to take a pic, but the vibrations messed up the focus function on my camera! This was the best I could get!

Ok, I think that's it for details on our Shanghai shenanigans! Shanghai is indeed a very new and modern city in comparison to the other cities of China. I'll post pics and info from Xi'an in a couple of days! :)

Back From the Latest Adventure......China!

Well, I have just returned from my latest source of adventure - the People's Republic of China! After flying almost 13 hours from Shanghai to Kuwait, I am tired but had a lot of time to think back over my trip and I have to say, China met and greatly exceeded all my expectations!! :)

This is Bill and I waiting for a taxi outside of Pudong International Airport shortly after our plane touched down in Shanghai.......

The last 12 days were spent exploring, traveling within this giant country and seeing some of the world's coolest heritage sites. We started out in Shanghai, then to Xi'an and on to Beijing before returning to Shanghai to fly back home to Kuwait.

View My Adventure in China! in a larger map

We were told on one of the many tours we took, that there are three main cities that represent different time periods in China. Xi'an represents China's past, with buildings and various artifacts dating back as far as 5,000 years. Beijing represents China's present with old history mingling with new. Shanghai represents China's future and this can be easily seen with all the new and modern structures, the push for investments and the drive to be a "world" city with Expo 2010 starting up there in May. These 3 cities are almost equidistantly apart........about 1400km give or take. We did travel to each of them within this Chinese triangle, and saw and did almost everything there was to see and do!

The People

Communicating was not as hard as I thought and had been told it would be. I did have all our hotels' addresses and the places we wanted to go translated into Mandarin before we left Kuwait and that definitely helped out, but overall the Chinese people seemed to be very used to English speakers using hand gestures and facial expressions to get their message across! Most people we had to speak to for tourist purposes did not know ANY English, but we were still somehow able to communicate.

I did not expect to be met with such open kindness and a willingness to help regardless of the language barrier. In all three big cities, we met amazing people who just wanted to help us find whatever we were looking for, practice their English or proudly show us their country and culture. I have many email addresses, business cards and pics of the people we met and have already received emails from them! I guess to sum up the general impression of the people of China - genuine and sincere. So often in North American culture we take someone's number or email and say we'll contact them, get together or whatever, but never follow through or really mean it. This doesn't seem to be a prevalent action in Chinese culture. If you say something, you mean it and WILL follow through. :)

The Weather

It was COLD!!!! Shanghai was a very damp, bone-chilling cold with all the humidity and being located on the coast. Xi'an was more of a dry-cold, and was far more comfortable than Shanghai with regards to the temperature. Beijing however, had a record breaking cold snap with temperatures dipping below -10 Celsius and SNOW!! For this girl who has been used to living in the desert for the past 5 months, that felt insanely COLD! Everyday we went out walking around for hours, exploring different parts of the city and surrounding countryside and every evening I had to take a very hot shower and or bath to warm up. I'm sad to admit my strong Canadian cold genes seem to have disappeared from my system these past few months. What have I become!?!? LOL

The Government

Considering the People's Republic of China is run by the Communist Party, you would expect to see a lot of evidence of this and a general feeling of oppression, at least that's what I expected to find in China. Oddly enough, it was quite the opposite feeling! There didn't seem to be much evidence in the various cities we traveled. The odd time something would strike me as being "communist" such as all the ministry sanctioned tourism workers, or the fact that the Chinese government has banned and blocked all access to Facebook, Blogger and Youtube. Apparently these sites aided in the recent political unrest in some of the more southern provinces, so the government blocked them in order to exercise control over communications. Other than that, the feeling was one of efficiency (in Shanghai), cultural integrity (in Xi'an) and a desire to show the world their history (in Beijing). Promoting their image in a positive light is a main priority, and I guess that alone makes sense considering the government. I don't know though, it's hard to put into words, but I just didn't expect to feel that comfortable in a communist country. Granted, I didn't get any opportunity to discuss religious rights and freedoms(or lack of them) with anyone and perhaps that may be where one would see the great divide. There was a definite police presence in the cities, but again it wasn't a threatening one, at least not to a Western visitor. The parts of China I experienced definitely left a good and positive impression on me. However, I would love to see more of the rural countryside and visit the smaller villages and farming areas to see if my feelings of comfort would change.

Alright, so I know people are looking forward to seeing some pictures and I am currently trying to figure out how to go about sharing them as I have almost 1,000 pics to go through! I will try to do it in a few posts, going in chronological order of the trip, starting with Shanghai. Please be patient as I go through the ridiculous amount of pics and decide what to write in my posts during the next week! Hope you enjoy them! :)