Goodbye for now

I know a lot of you encouraged me to continue by blog, but I just can't garner any enthusiasm for it. Maybe one day I'll start another blog with a really cool name and a really cool theme. I'll let you know, but until then, goodbye.

Heber

I know it's been forever since I last posted, but there's just nothing I want to write about at the moment. I did go up to Heber this past weekend and took some pictures of the beautiful landscape. So here they are. That's all . . . for now.

Camille Jean Zurcher

I designed Camille's baby announcements. These were easy to design because the photos were so artistically done and they are really the main design of the cards. Well, I'm getting ready to go to her baby blessing in about 20 minutes. It will be a great fourth with my family! Happy Independence Day!




Well, we just got back so here are some pictures from the event. Tomorrow's event: boating on Utah Lake! So excited. We got a ski for Caroline so it will be her first attempt tomorrow. There may be tears, but I'm sure we'll all have fun!

Emily's Present

Emily's birthday is tomorrow (Happy Birthday Emily!) and I decided to give her a portrait like the one I did of Kate for Christmas and I decided I'd post a picture of it. She was here in Utah this past weekend so I was able to give it to her personally. I had it framed like Kate's and the two pictures actually look really neat together so I took a picture of that too. Sorry about the reflections!

Beijing

On the morning of Thursday, May 20th, Max and I flew from Xi'an to Beijing. Have I told you about Chinese domestic flights? The flight must have only been about an hour and a half, yet they gave us full meals. Obviously, the food is nothing to rave about, but they don't give that food out on American flights unless it's at least 4 hours long and that's only if it's a more expensive airline. The first thing we did when we got to Beijing was go to Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City.


Here I am, standing in Tiananmen Square, with The Forbidden City and Chairman Mao's big face behind me. The other pictures are building that surround the square. I don't really know what they are though. In the square, there would be these random people selling water because it was so hot. It wasn't anything official. They would just have a flat of bottled water. The bottles were clearly cold because I could see the precipitation on them, but I couldn't figure out where they got cold water from. We were headed down into the subway when about 5 of them came running through with their water to hide because the police showed up and apparently it's illegal to pedal water the way they were doing. I thought it was pretty funny.





The Forbidden City is absolutely huge! I understand why they call it a city now. It was building after courtyard after building and so on. The picture above shows a detail on one of the buildings. This has obviously been restored. A lot of the buildings near the entrance were restored like this, but mostly it wasn't restored, which I think I liked best because it made it seem more historical and real. There were some rooms we were able to look into that had everything in place, supposedly as it was when it was in use. We were only allowed to look in the windows. Every room had a big elaborate dais and throne for the emperor and I thought the rooms all looked kind of alike, but each room had a different use.




Here's a portion that hasn't been restored.



This is some natural rock formed by rainwater in the garden portion of the palace. After visiting The Forbidden City, Max and I went to the silk market. This place doesn't just sell silk, it sells EVERYTHING. I mean, anything you ever wanted probably exists in this 5-story + basement building. There was stall after stall of clothing, toys, jewelry, shoes, electronic, fabric, etc. As you walk through, the salespeople are fairly aggressive and yell out to you as you walk by. Since I was wearing a pink shirt that day, they were calling me "pink lady" in order to get my attention. It was an experience, but I didn't get to browse as much as I would have liked because if you even glance at anything in interest, they pounce on you. I did, however, look at the pearls because I knew I wanted to buy some. I've always really liked those little seed pearls, but none of the pre-made jewelry incorporated these pearls in their designs. Max told me I could just design something and they'd make it for me. So I had them twist several stands of the seed pearls with one strand of slightly larger pearls. I really love it and I'll post a picture later. Once again, Max helped me get a good price.


The day before I had to leave China, Max and I went with a group from our hostel to the Great Wall. We went to an old part of the wall so we didn't have to pay and entrance fee (unless you count the old lady in the middle of the path with a sickle that forced our guide to pay her some money) and there weren't very many people around. We were an eclectic group; 2 Americans, 2 Dutch, 2 French, 1 Norwegian and 1 Chinese, but we made quick friends and it was quite enjoyable.




This wasn't just a nice little stroll, this was a hike. In the picture above, you can see the tower at the top were ultimately ended up at. It doesn't look very steep in this picture, but that stretch of wall you see started with stairs and then a slope. I think the angle of the incline was steeper than 45 degrees. It was a workout, but a lot of fun because it was scenic.



All in all, I had a very fun trip. I don't know if I'd ever plan another trip to China, but I'm glad I got to experience it once. If I went back, I'd probably go to Hong Kong again. That place merits more exploration. Max was lucky he was able to live there for a couple of months and I'm happy he invited me over for a little adventure. Now I've been thinking about where I want to travel to next. Italy and Australia are top on my list.

Xi'an

On the night of Monday, May 17th, Max and I made sure we were at the train station way ahead of schedule. We bought soft sleeper tickets. This meant we were in a cabin with only 2 other people. We had the top bunks and below us were 2 Chinese men who clearly spoke no English. We left at 8 PM. In the ceiling of our cabin was a speaker they used to pipe soft hits throughout the train. This went on until about 10 PM when they turned it off so people could sleep. The 2 Chinese men under us had fallen asleep and when the music was turned off, we could hear both of the them snoring. I looked over at Max the same time he looked at me and we both just started laughing. These guys were synchronized. When one was breathing in, the other would be breathing out. I put my earphones in, which, fortunately, also double as ear plugs, and fell asleep until about 5:30 AM. At that point, I was just lightly dozing until 7:00 AM when they thought it would be a good idea to turn the soft hits on again. Did I tell you how loud the volume was? It was loud enough that if Max and I wanted to talk we had to raise our voices. Luckily, we arrived in Xi'an around 11 AM. It was quite the experience and I was able to see some of the beautiful countryside of China. By the way, Xi'an is pronounced "She-an."


This was the hostel we stayed at in Xi'an. I really liked this place despite the concrete slab that was our bed. You can't tell in this picture, but when you open those doors, the sill of the door came up about 1 and a half feet, so we had to step over it. The hostel had a series of courtyards and houses and everything was open. Again, you can't tell from this picture, but this place held a lot of depth. Also, I liked it because there were four adorable kittens that lived here. Just down the street from the hostel, was this restaurant that Max and I liked so much, we went there for dinner twice. On the second night, we were eating when our waiter came running by, preceded by a rat he was chasing. We had to remind ourselves that we were in China.


This is the bell tower in Xi'an and below is the drum tower. Right around this area is the Muslim Quarter. They have a lot of dried fruits and nuts for sale here and they also have a market where there is plenty of touristy things to buy. This is were I decided to buy Cole and Caroline each a kite and a jade bracelet for myself. Max was a rather good bargainer and got me some great prices on these items.

The Kites.
The Bracelet.


This is a restored version of one of the gates to the city of Xi'an. Max and I walked around the streets in this area one night. All we really did was walk and take in everything that was happening. A lot of cooking, relaxing and Mahjong playing. I learned how to play Mahjong in Hong Kong and really wanted to bring some tiles home, but they're so heavy! In Xi'an there are a bunch of these guys that ride around on motorized bikes with a sort of cart thing attached to the back that two people can ride in. Everywhere we went, we were asked if we wanted a ride. As we were walking in what we thought was the direction of our hostel one night, we decided to take one just for fun. It was probably a good thing we took it because we were so turned around. It was a crazy ride with a lot of horn honking involved, but we made it back to the hostel.



Of course, the main reason people go to Xi'an is to see the Terra Cotta Warriors. These were only discovered in 1974 by a farmer digging a well. We saw this guy in the gift shop signing autographs. I thought that was kind of funny. I just can't believe China didn't know about this tomb before 36 years ago. Anyway, when they first opened up the tomb, the statues were in pieces. The ones you see in these pictures are only replicas. The reason this emperor's tomb is in Xi'an, is because Xi'an was the capital city for four dynasties. This emperor is actually the guy who first commissioned the building of the Great Wall and I guess he wasn't too well liked because soon after he was buried in his tomb, it was raided and a lot of the statues were broken and ceilings collapsed. Apparently, all the warriors have different faces and they were originally painted. In a museum portion of this place, we actually saw a few warriors that still had a little paint on them. All the warriors carried brass weapons and we saw many of these in the museum as well.




Beijing is that last stop on my China trip. Visit again soon for the final posting!

Shanghai

On the morning of May 13th, Max and I headed up to Shenzhen. Shenzhen is right on the border of Hong Kong, so this was where we crossed over to mainland China and this is where facebook stopped working. We had the intention of buying train tickets to Shanghai, but when we got there, we found out they had no tickets for about 3 days. We had an "oh crap" moment where we contemplated going back to Hong Kong, but Max didn't have any more entries to China on his Visa. After walking around for a while, we decided we could fly even though we'd have to spend way more than we wanted to. I took my phone out and looked up how to get from the Shenzhen train station to the Shenzhen airport. It was a 45 minute mini-bus ride which Max claims was the most comfortable ride of the trip. Once at the airport we booked a ticket and ended up in Shanghai a whole half day early!


This was the hostel we stayed at. Every time we came and went from the hostel, we had to cross a fairly busy street. This was when we realized that traffic lights and signs are not law, but more of a suggestion. Also, pedestrians never have the right of way, not even in a cross walk. It kind of felt like playing Frogger, but for real.


One of the first things Max and I did in Shanghai was go to the World Expo. This is me waiting in the security line. We felt a bit like cattle.


The first pavilion we went to was ours of course! I didn't care too much for the building. It felt too corporate, but they had some awesome HD digital projectors inside.

This was the little cartoon character that represented the Expo.

Max and I both bought one of these passports in the gift shop. In each pavilion we went to, we'd get a stamp. We collected about 65 stamps and we probably didn't even go to half of the pavilions. We couldn't go to very many European pavilions because the lines were so long for those and we just didn't have enough time to wait.

On each page of the passport, there would be a little illustration of one of the pavilions. There was only about 48 pages in the passport, so they couldn't give a page to each country. Above, you can see the USA pavilion on page 44, so we got the stamp for that pavilion on that page.

Israel had a page, so we got a stamp on that page too. Iran, however, did not have their own page, so Max and I tried to see if we could get Iran to stamp on Israel's page. They would not. The guy stamped on the next page, which was Italy. Max went on to make North Korea and Cuba stamp on the USA page.


Speaking of Iran, in their pavilion, Max and I were surrounded by a bunch of school kids. All the boys were asking Max for their picture with him and all the girls were asking for their picture with me. Max and I finally had to leave the pavilion as fast as possible because we were afraid people were going to start thinking we were some sort of celebrities and want their picture with us too. This happened to Max many more times. I think the Chinese people were awed by his height. Other people would just take pictures of us as we were walking by. There aren't too many foreigners in China and I guess because we look so different from them, they want pictures of us. It was kind of weird and I've always hated when I've accidentally gotten into a stranger's picture because I don't want them to have a picture of me. Well, that went out the window!


This was China's pavilion. Of course it was the largest and one of the only permanent buildings. Unfortunately, Max and I didn't know we needed a reservation to go inside so we didn't get to see it. We heard they will stay open. I guess it's kind of like a museum. So if I ever go to Shanghai again, I can still see it.


This was the UK's pavilion. I thought it was one of the most interesting-looking buildings. Max and I didn't get to go inside thought. Look at that line!


Denmark brought the famous Little Mermaid statue. It's never left Denmark and I read that they even had a debate in their parliament about whether or not to bring it. China wanted it though, so they got it!

This is Switzerland. They had a gondola on the roof that people could ride. This was another long line, so we didn't get to see inside.

In Mexico's pavilion, they had these masks, so Max and I took a few pictures. Some of the pavilions had restaurants with food from that country. Max and I were craving Mexican food and since Mexican food is non-existent in China, this was our only chance. It was pretty good.

We didn't spend our whole time in Shanghai at the Expo though. We went to the downtown area where all the cool buildings are. This one is called the Oriental Pearl Television Tower.

Max and I went to the 100th floor of the building that looks like it has a handle. It's called the SWFC, which stands for Shanghai World Financial Center. It was built in 2008 and it's taller than the Sear's Tower and the Empire State Building. We took a really fast elevator form the first floor the the 94th floor. I think it took less than a minute. It was so fast we had to keep popping our ears because we were ascending so fast.

You can see the Huangpu River and the Oriental Pearl Television Tower behind me. We were in a room right above the space in the building that makes it look like it has a handle, so the floor had glass panels in some places were we could see the streets and buildings below us.

This is Jing'an Temple. It's a Buddhist monastery right in the middle of the city.

Max and I were suppose to leave on a train to Xi'an on the night of May 16th, but when we got to the station only 5 minutes before the scheduled departure, they had already closed the gate. We were pretty mad at ourselves, but we were able to exchange our tickets for the next night and got an extra day in Shanghai.