Bangkok

Jasmine, Sophia, and I took a weekend trip to Bangkok, Thailand, and it was absolutely fantastic. I love Bangkok. We spent 4 days there and fit in a lot of sight-seeing and a LOT of shopping. The Thailand Baht is about 35 to 1 usd, so everything was ridiculously cheap.

We stayed in a nice little hostel that was pretty close to everything, although we had trouble getting a room for 3 people, so we ended up getting a 2 person room and all 3 of us ladies slept sideways on the bed with our feet dangling off!

Some of the sights we saw were the giant reclining budda.. which was ENORMOUS. It took up a whole length of a building.
They made me wear this shirt in the building because we weren't allow to have bare shoulders.. gross.

The coolest part of our weekend was going to the Floating Market! We got to hire a little motor boat that takes you down this narrow channel of water, and all along the route there are little vendors on the banks and in boats floating around too trying to sell you trinkets and fruit and coconut drinks! SO incredible. This video is a little sample of what it was like!


Here are some pictures from the floating market. Sophia and I were drinking our coconut water! Mmm.



From the Floating Market, our boat driver took us to this remote area where we got off the boat and walked into this jungle-esque area. It was pretty shady. But we were going to see elephants! Another huge highlight of the trip. We got to ride elephants for only 600 Baht and they took us around this trail ... just like a horseback riding trail where all the elephants just walk and follow each other along the loop. So neat. We even went through water, which was scary cause I almost slipped out of the seat!

eXL Dance Performance

My friends and I, but mostly thanks to Harley (extreme heart in planning anything and everything) organized a hip hop dance group of local and exchange students at the beginning of the semester. We practiced 2 nights a week, sometimes on weekends too, for the whole semester to prepare for our performance on this past Friday, May 8th at the Cultural Exchange Showcase (a variety of talents from around the world)... which was a 2-hour show also organized by Harley! Haha.

Here is the video from our show! Hope you like it! (If you watch carefully at 5:48, I got kicked in the face going up into the freeze.. hard hahah)

SB: 1st Stop, Xi'an, China

I had never really heard of Xi'an before this trip, so I had no idea what to expect. Our flight from Shenzhen took about 2 hours (with a meal). It wasn't too painful to find out youth hostel in the city, and we were happy to see that it was a lot nicer and cooler than we expected. It was a really old building and it was intensely decorated on the inside. We slept in the basement, and I shared a room with 2 other girls, Hawra and Jasmine. Everything about the hostel was great, except one MAJOR problem.

There was a cat (or 2 at one point) living in the vents above all of our rooms. Every night, the cats would run, fight, scream (have you ever heard a cat scream?? Well I have now.), hiss, tumble, screech ALL night long. It was the worst thing of my life. The cat was mostly above our room the whole time, but all the other people down the hall said they heard it all night too. Hawra was using the bathroom earlier in the evening when suddenly the ceiling light fixture was kicked out by this devil-cat, and it almost fell on her. So now we had a wide opening for any rabid animal to come tumbling down into our room. Great.

After the first sleepless night, we informed the front desk staff of the hostel, but our attempts to clearly convey "cat in ceiling" failed. And I'm sure it would have been an unbelievable story to someone who COULD understand English. So of course, it was still there the next night, screaming and wailing its face off. Jasmine and I decided to booby-trap our vent and see if we could get the cat to fall through when it stepped on the vent covering (and yes, then releasing this wild and furious lion into our room..).
After setting up a camera to film the room while we left for dinner, we came back terrified of the possibility of this thing being in or room or having torn apart our stuff in its rage. But no, it was still in the ceiling. Every night we stayed in Xi'an.

Despite all the drama with the cat, Xi'an was fun. There were night markets and day markets, and the main site we visited was the Army of Terracotta Warriors. There are over 6000 life-size soldiers and horses that guard the tomb of the first emperor Qin Shi Huang
Another touristy attraction we saw in Xi-an was the Huaqing Pool, or ancient natural hot springs. The pools served as private hot baths for emperors during the Tang dynasty. This area was really pretty and we enjoyed walking around the gardens and pools. I may or may not have received a curse from ancient emperors from climbing over the barrier fence and climbing down into the hot spring pool to collect as many Chinese coins as I could. There's a video.



We also saw the Banpo Neolithic Village, which is remains from supposedly 6000 years ago.. I don't know.. but it was still pretty neat. We traveled about 2 hours out of the civilized city into the much more shady and underdeveloped areas... where the stares from the locals quickly changed from ones of facination to ones of sheer surprise that we were spotted in such an area. That was a bad sign right away. But we ended up being safe, and by the time we got to the village site, it had actually just closed. Harley used his average Mandarin skills and above-average persuasive skills to get us all in. So we had the whole park/museum to ourselves. We saw old mud huts and burial sites. More interesting than it sounds though!


We also went up in the Bell Tower and Drum Tower, which each had a great view of the traffic down below. Others got a much better video than I did.. but here's just a sample:



In the Bell Tower, we by chance caught the musical show they do every day.

Spring Break - China

I just returned from an incredible 11-day spring break tour of mainland China. 1200 pictures and videos later, I have a million stories to tell. First of all, a group of 12 exchange students (10 Americans, 1 Swedish, and 1 Finnish) went on the trip. Our itinerary looked like this: MTR from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, China, flight to Xian, flight to Hefei, 7-hour train to Huang Shan, 3-hour bus to Shanghai, flight back to Shenzhen.

Each city we traveled too was completely different from the others, so it was really neat to see a bunch of different places.

Here is a picture of almost all of our group in front of our hostel in Xian! (minus Ari and Sophia)

Just for Mamita :)

List of Foods I Have Eaten in the Past Week:

• Cow Stomach
• Ox Tail
  
• Chicken Feet
• Pork Cartilage
• Pig Ear
• Goose
• Duck
• Oyster Omelets
  
• Beef Tendons
• Prawn Chips
• Red Bean Soup
• Eel
• Tapioca soup with coconut milk
• Ramen Noodles
  

Mosquito Pond

There have been construction crews right outside of the dorms every morning (VERY early) working to clean out the entire pond that sits between Hall IV and Hall VI.. a pond that the locals call "Mosquito Pond" and other names that embody its grossness and smell. Apparently. I didn't notice if it smelled or not before they started draining it, but it was definitely solid brown. On good days you could see the poor koi fish in it. A local told me they didn't take the fish out before they drained it either :(

So after the pond was completely drained, they brought in dump trucks and loaders to shovel out all the muck and mud that was at the bottom. I think the whole project took about 3 weeks but was still not quite finished.

We enjoyed a monsoon today, all day.