Week 9 & 10

Last week was a blast. My friends and I as well as the entire international department at our school, went to Xian.

Xian is a mid sized city west of Beijing. A train there was roughly 13 hours long. As soon as we arrived our class toured the wall that surrounds the city. Since the wall was very wide you could rent a bike and drive around. The wall itself wasn’t so interesting but riding a bike on a piece of Chinese architecture is awesome.

After that we went to see the terracotta warriors.

This was larger than I imagined, the whole place is composed of 3 different large pits filled with hand crafted terracotta soldiers from over 400 years ago.

My old Chinese teacher at Marvin ridge lives and teaches English in Xian so I couldn’t pass up a chance like this to see her. We finally met up near her school 回民建. Surprisingly enough I couldn’t recognize her when I first saw her and asked her if she knew Wang laoshi.

She brought her daughter along, cutest little thing.

The next morning she gave me a tour of the school and her student’s classrooms. They all were happy to greet me and practice their English.

Xian is a heavily Muslim populated city so the food and culture is much different from Beijing. The noodles were to say at least interesting to eat.

Week 8

I don’t have a lot to say about this week. This may be due to the fact that I am quarantined, yep that’s right. Woke up with a 101 fever and I got sent to the hospital. In America if you had a fever you’d probably stay away from school and take some Tylenol. But in China, everyone freaks out when the American kid’s head gets hot. Swine flu is still an issue over here and there taking as many precautions as possible, including keeping me in a separate dorm room without exit for the past 3 days. Sure I feel pretty sick but it’s not as big of a deal as they think. I don’t think I mentioned this before, but since I got here they constantly check the international department student’s temperatures. Every morning and every night we get our heads scanned by these temperature guns. Since I’ve been sick I don’t know how many times I’ve heard duo he shui (drink lots of water) and ni qu yiyuan! (go to hospital). My sickness is clearing up now but I think I’ll be confined for a little longer. I feel so weak, it’s going to be hard to get back on schedule with the gym, haha.