This summer I took a school trip to China. Our itinerary took us through Beijing, Xi'an, Guilin, Shang Hai and Hong Kong. The whole trip lasted two weeks. I took all of these photos.
Our first stop in Beijing was Tiananmen Square. It is the largest square in the world and is very important in Chinese culture. This is a picture of the Zhengyangmen Gate Tower that used to be part of the city wall.
Here's a picture of me in front of a monument in the center of the square. The monument was for the soldiers that fought for China.
On one side of the square, there was the Tiananmen Gate. On the front sits the worlds largest oil painting of Chairmen Mao.
We headed to the Forbidden City after that. It was surrounded by three gates that used to be used to keep the common people out. Now the gates are kept open for tourists. This is the first gate.
Here's a picture of me in front of the courtyard in the Forbidden City. We spent a couple hours exploring the different walls and courtyards of the Forbidden City.
This is the emperor's throne in the Forbidden City. It was inlayed with gold.
These statues were outside most buildings and helped protect the people inside.
This is a street artist who would use a big brush to draw people's faces with water.
That afternoon, we headed to a park to practice Tai Chi with a local teacher. Here's the area we used.
We walked down a long outdoor hall that was covered in very detailed drawings. The hall was at least a mile long!
A big feature of the park was The Marble Boat. I don't know much about it, but it was big with tourists.
This is our first dinner. All of the ones that followed were pretty close to the same. We sat at a big circular table with a lazy Susan in the middle. The waiters brought out a big bowl of rice and everyone would get some of that. Then they would bring out more and more food until the table was full. It was a cool way to eat.
The next morning, we headed to the Beijing zoo. This was the entryway.
This is me with some flowers inside the front gate.
The main exhibit at the zoo was the pandas. There were 7 adult pandas that were out for viewing.
We found another panda sleeping with its leg sticking up in the air. It was pretty cute.
That afternoon, we took a bus out to a ski lift and rode up to the Great Wall of China. On the section we were at, there were 6 towers that we could walk in-between. There were some great views.
Me with the Great Wall!
The stairs were super steep! It was quite a workout to walk around.
A local person showed us that the distant mountain range looked a lot like a sideways face.
I payed extra to take a toboggan ride down from the wall to the bus! It was one of my favorite parts of the trip. The whole track was about a mile long and you could go as fast as you wanted. I didn't get a picture but here's the sign.
That night, we had my favorite dinner of the trip. The hotpot! We each had our own personal hotpot and we would make our own little soup with raw noodles, raw meat and raw vegetables. Each ingredient would take about 30 seconds to a minute to cook. It was awesome!
The next day, we flew to a smaller city in the center of China called Xi'an. We didn't do much that day other than that.
Our first full day in Xi'an, we headed to the Terra-cotta Warriors! This was a highlight of my trip. There are three pits that have been excavated so far and we spent four hours walking in between all of them and taking lots of pictures.
The first pit was by far the biggest and had over 6,000 warriors. Most of the warriors are still under reconstruction from the ceiling collapse.
The soldiers were each unique and very detailed. It was amazing to see all of them.
Here's a picture from the side facing the front. Its easy to see how many warriors there are.
Me with the warriors.
Afterwards, we went to a Chinese Burger King for lunch. I thought that the bathroom sign was funny.
Here's another dinner.
One night, we headed to a local mall. This was a statue in the arcade section.
The next place we went to was a small rural town in the mountains called Yangshuo. It had crazy mountains that poked straight up out of the ground.
One of the nights, we had Chinese pizza for dinner, but I had rice noodle soup instead. I turned out that the pizza was terrible and my soup was way better.
I signed up for a tour of a local rice farm. This was the truck(?) that took us around the farm.
The farmers used water buffaloes to plow their fields.
Here are some interesting flavored potato chips.
In Shanghai, there are several super tall buildings. This particular one, the Shanghai Tower, was built to look like a tornado. It is over 2,000 feet tall!
We headed across the street to the Shanghai World Finance Center which has exactly 100 stories and is 1,600 feet tall.
The Shanghai World Finance Center is shaped kind of like a long bottle opener and on the very top floor, there is a glass floor. It was pretty scary to look down!
We go the chance to see the largest jade buddha in the world. We weren't allowed to take pictures but these were other statues that were in the temple.
Looking past the ancient Buddha temple, you could see the Shanghai Tower.
We visited a silk factory and they showed us how they pulled the silk off of silk worms cocoons. This is one of their machines.
They would use the silk to make silk comforters. We got to see how they pulled the silk to make hundreds of layers. Several people in our group bought the comforters.
This was an ancient garden that was used for meditation. It is still kept open nowadays.
This was a popular spot to take pictures of the Shanghai buildings.
The view was pretty cool.
Shanghai had a pretty cool night show that started at 7. Most of the buildings across the river would light up with different graphics and words.
Heres the same building a few seconds later. It says the same thing but just in Chinese.
Food like this was all around the markets we went to. It always smelled so bad.
These were all fried bugs. Bleh!
We were walking around and saw a statue of Ant-Man. Okay?
For our trip, we had an awesome tour guide who gave himself the American name of Owen. He was fluent in English and very easy to get to know.
Our last stop of the trip was in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is not quite part of China but is its own little country. Its second largest industry is shipping. This is a picture of some of the shipping crates in the harbor.
On display at a downtown shop was a life-size wax model of Cristiano Ronaldo. It was super realistic!
We took a trolley ride up to the top of a mountain called Victoria Peak. There was an incredible view!
Our last lunch was at a fancy seafood restaurant. Here was the flounder that they served us.
There were some very strange clam things in the kitchen area.
China had a lot of interesting flavors of Oreo's.
