Hello again, This post goes out to Chase Gregory who apparently told my mother that I haven't been posting enough. Thus, properly guilt tripped, I am back to writing. I will attempt to make this my extra-long-catch-up-post and then update more frequently. That probably won't happen, but it's the thought that counts... Right?

I have been pretty busy lately, Two weeks ago my parents came into town so I spent all of my time with them. It was great to see them again in person rather than on skype, and it was a blast to show them around Shanghai, as I have come to know it, and get to spend some quality time.

Last week were my midterms for my Chinese classes. Since my parents came the week before, I pretty much did not study anywhere near as much as I should have... But I did fine anyway, and I remembered why I used to actually enjoy finals week in high school: You go in for two hours in the morning and then essentially have a free day.

Megan and I decided to put our free day to good use and go see some part of Shanghai that we would never go to otherwise. Megan remembered looking out the side of a metro and seeing a cool looking area, so we went to the metro, looked at the map, and picked a stop that we thought was somewhere near that area, and just got off.

Shanghai did not develop like a normal city would. Usually cities develop from the center outwards, with the new replacing the old, and so on. However, Shanghai didn't work that way. One of the results of having the Chinese government structured the way it is, is that the government can pretty much point and say" I would like a huge, modern, beautiful, apartment complex right there." "Make it so." And a portion of old shanghai is then removed to make way for said complex. One of the side effects is that there are random pockets of old Shanghai that are left untouched.

The are that Megan and I ended up in was one such area. We wandered into a tiny winding road that ran between really tiny little one or two room homes that were kind of attached. I did not have my camera at the time, but I would like to go back and take pictures to post. We realized that the road we were on was not really a road so much as it was the hallway of an apartment complex. It really was fascinating to me how the people were living. From their homes you could look up and see the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, but yet they did not have running water... I am pretty sure we were the first westerners to wander through that are, if not the first foreigners some of the people there had ever seen. The fact that the people who lived in the are were staring at us made me feel better about staring into their homes.

We had all been kind of avoiding eating too much of the street food in Shanghai, if only because so many people we know (mostly in the states) keep telling us that eating it was tantamount to death, but we decided that since the majority of the population of Shanghai actually lives on the stuff, it really can't be deadly if you choose carefully and avoid meat that has been sitting out etc. So when we turned a corner and were in the middle of a massive street devoted entirely to street food we decided that since we were exploring the "real" shanghai we would eat accordingly, and munched our way from one end to the other.

The food was completely amazing (for the record, I didn't get sick) and I really enjoyed trying all the different flavors. We started with buns, and then we say a man with a massive wok of boiling oil who was pulling dough into super thin strands and cooking them. We pretty much had to buy some, if only out of respect for the man's dough pulling skills. If you have ever been to a Chinese restaurant in the states and gotten little crunchy fried noodle things, these were everything that those were supposed to be... and so much more. They were hot and fresh and delicious.

We finished up our walk with some dumplings. Megan and I each picked one up, started walking, and bit into them... Just in time to realize that they had exploded broth/juice out of the other end. Fortunately, since China is a country that never has paper goods when you need them, both Megan and I had, by that point, learned the important lesson that: no good Chinese girl ever leaves the house without her pocket sized pack of tissues, and were prepared.

Saturday the five of us and our host families went to Wu Zhen. Wu Zhen is an ancient Chinese town built on canals. They call it the Venice of the East. I wouldn't go quite that far, but it was definitely a great trip. It was fun to travel with all of the host parents and siblings as well.

We took a bus there in the morning and then went straight to lunch. Lunch was a massive affair. We ate and ate and ate and ate, and then we ate. And then desert came, and it was sugar cane which was delicious, and we were really happy because, a) we really liked the sugar cane, and b) it meant that lunch was over. Or so we thought... then the rest of the main courses came...

My favorite parts of the town were the boat ride and the bamboo forest. After lunch we got onto a little boat (think Chinese style gondola) and went down the canals of the city. It was a beautiful ride, and fascinating as well. One of the things that I find the most interesting about China is that people live in all of their preserved ancient towns. They may convert half the city to museums, and channel bus loads of tourists through everyday, but that doesn't change the fact that there are parts of the tourist attractions that are still viable living quarters, and in a country with a population as large as China, that means that they will be inhabited.

The second thing that I enjoyed a lot was the tiny little piece of bamboo forest preserved in the center of the town. When I wandered into even that little patch of bamboo I could understand the inspiration for movies like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

A lot of the homes in Wu Zhen had been converted into Museums which were a lot of fun to walk around. They had a wood carving museum, an ancient bed museum, and a museum of old currency, local and foreign, on top of the restored library and firehouse.

After that trip, I will never in my life question what my host mother can contain in her bag. She got on the bus in the morning with a slightly larger than middle sized tote bag. She proceeded to pull out breakfast 2: Juice boxes of coffee for all of us, two boxes of poky, a large bag of chips, and a large bag of tangerines. I thought that that meant that the tote was empty except for the usual stuff one would carry: wallet, keys, phone... How wrong I was. Throughout the day she pulled probably a weeks worth of food from that bag including everything from a chocolate bar that my French teacher had introduced me to in France (yay Bueno Bars) to individual hermetically sealed packs of beef jerky and duck.

My Host dad just called me for lunch, so:

To Be Continued

Wow, I managed to let the time get away from me again. Quite a bit has happened since the last time I got around to updating.

Last weekend CIEE took the gap year kids to Huangshan (yellow mountain) in Anhui province. It is supposed to be the most beautiful set of mountains in China, and it lived up to its reputation. The five of us were accompanied by the CIEE director of student activities, Maggie. She is incredibly nice. I really enjoyed talking with her. She was also an international relations major. She is working at CIEE because she is interested in eventually working at an education NGO.

We took a train to get there which was really fun. We traveled "hard sleeper" class, which means that you have a bunk bed in a large car full of beds. They are stacked three high and kind of in compartments but not really. There are two sets of three bunks divided by a wall but they are open ended to the corridor down the car is open. I had the very top bunk, and I had to climb a ladder to get up to it. There wasn't enough room for me to fully sit up, so I felt really bad for Nate, who is 6'2''. The pricing on train tickets is actually quite interesting, with bunks getting more expensive the closer they are to the ground.

After that trip I have now ridden in every class available on Chinese trains except for hard seat, which is apparently essentially just benches, and I am more than happy to avoid.

Chinese trains have a great feature. At the end of each car they have a large tank that dispenses nuclear temperature boiling water. So everyone can bring ramen and tea and use the hot water to have a continuous supply of hot food and drinks.

When we arrived we were met by our tour guide and driver and took the hour drive up to the base of the mountain. From the base we took a special Huangshan taxi up to the station a little way up the mountain. From there we took a cable car to get onto the mountain itself. The view from the cable car was amazingly beautiful. There was one point where we transitioned from being in the clear air going up the mountain to being in the clouds themselves which was amazing.

Huangshan is known for its contrasts: between beautiful trees and bare rock formations, and between the sky and the clouds. At first when we got up to the part of the mountain we would be walking I was really disappointed because we were in the clouds and I couldn't see very far from the mountain. But it turned out that that was the magical part. Every so often the clouds would break, a shaft of sunlight would bunch through and we would suddenly be able to see another mountain across from us, or a new rock formation. It was almost magical. The one part of it that was really sad was that no matter how much I love the new camera my parents got for me before I came to China, absolutely nothing could capture the amazing quality of the light breaking through the clouds.

Another contrast that they don't mention when they tell you about Huangshan is the contrast between the natural beauty of the place and the incredibly number of people who come to see it. Everything is pretty contained, built, and organized to deal with the massive amount of tourists on the mountain. These aren't western tourists. There were a few others that we saw, but by and large these were Chinese people from all over the country coming to see a natural. Much like Americans would go to see Yosemite or the Grand Canyon.

As we got up to the top of the peaks and through some of the longer harder climbs the tourists thinned out and we were able to see more and do a little more interacting with the mountain and climbing around. However, for the tourists who really wanted to get to the top, but didn't feel that they could do it under their own steam, there were men with sedan chairs willing to carry you around the mountain. I personally would not want to take one, because I feel like I might say something slightly offensive and the two men carrying the chair would only have to "accidentally" tip it ever so slightly to dump me over the side of the mountain.

That night we went back to a hotel in Huangshan City and had a wonderful dinner.

The next day we went to visit a very famous preserved traditional Chinese town, Hongcun. If any of you have seen Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, this city is where some of the scenes were filmed. Specifically it is famous for the bridge in front of the village.

The whole town is supposed to be shaped like an ox. It has two massive trees for horns, a pond as it's stomach, and four bridges for feet. It was really interesting to see the different preserved houses in the village. There were certain decorations and house designs that were reserved for people of different social standing.

After finishing up at the village we went for lunch at a really awesome restaurant. When we got there we were escorted down some stairs to the kitchen area. They had all of the available dishes on display, and we got to point at what we wanted. The chefs would then cook it and have it delivered to our table it. It was like dim sum without the carts.

We took a bus back to Shanghai. Ironically due to some strange layout of train tracks, it took up 10 hours on the train to get to Huangshan, and 5 hours by bus to get back... yeah...

I can't even begin to describe the bus. Suffice it to say that I really thought that I was going to shoot the driver before we reached Shanghai. First, I usually don't wear a seatbelt on buses mostly because they usually aren't available. After 10 minutes on that bus I went on a mission to find the seatbelt on my seat before the bus tried to stop again, and rocketed me down the aisle and through the windshield. Fortunately there was a seatbelt, which I did wear throughout the rest of the ride, despite the weird looks. Second, the driver and the horn were BEST FRIENDS FOREVER. I'm not joking. He leaned on the thing the entire way out of the city. We would be coming towards a car we wanted to pass with enough space for two other cars to drive figure eights around us and the driver would just lean on the horn like "HELLO, WE ARE THINKING OF PASSING YOU SOMETIME IN THE NEXT TEN MINUTES SO BE AWARE OF OUR APPROACH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" We finally got out of the city and onto a completely deserted mountain road and I was ready to breath a huge sigh of relief because there were no cars to honk at. Oh how wrong I was. Every time we approached a curve, and keep in mind that this was a twisty mountain road, so there were a lot of curves, the driver would lean on the horn as if to say "HEY YOU, ANY CARS THAT COULD POSSIBLY BE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THAT CAR, A BUS IS GOING TO BE COMING AROUND THE CURVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I thought I might cry. I don't even hear honking in Shanghai any more, I have got it almost completely blocked out, but I just could not block this out, because it kept me from sleeping. However after a while I stopped worrying about myself and started worrying about whether I was going to have to physically restrain Kate.

Since sleep was out of the question we ended up playing gin rummy across the aisle of the bus. Rummy really is more fun when it is dark out so you can't see any of the cards and have to call out your discards so the other players know what is going on.

We had two brief rest stops to buy food and use the bathrooms. I had another huge I love China moment when we came back from the second rest stop. Most of us had bought, Oreos, gummies, crackers, and the like, but Jonas came back with this bag with something spicy looking inside. When I asked him what it was he grinned and informed me that it was duck neck. Only in China...