Update

Hey neglected readers,

Sorry I left you hanging after Vietnam! After that point, I a.) ran out of Internet minutes on the ship and b.) was so overwhelmed and tired as the gravity of my trip set in. Trust me, Semester at Sea was heavy, emotionally and physically. Looking back now, over a year since we pulled back into Miami harbor, I still look back on my SAS experience as the coolest, but probably most exhausting, thing I've ever done in my life. I really tried to pack the most amount of activity I could into each port, but toward the end I started feeling really burnt out. Not that I regret it :)

Anyway, I'm going to attempt to pick up where I left off, which is CHINA!

HONG KONG

We docked in Hong Kong, which was, out of all the cities we docked in, the ritziest. It was like New York City but much cleaner and much more efficient. The Waterfront Mall that we were shuffled into as soon as we left the ship was straight A-list designer. After seeing the same sort of thing in South Africa and Vietnam, however, I wasn't too excited by it and quickly passed on through.

My friend Collyn and I resolved that we wanted to get as lost as possible in the city -- we had a full 24 hours in port and we wanted to explore it without any reservations. We left the port area and wandered around the downtown area for a while, which was pretty uninteresting, just lots of tall office buildings. The weather was a little gloomy because of the smog, and the atmosphere was a little depressing to me. I would hate to work somewhere that rarely got sunshine.

As we got further away from the waterfront, we found a small park randomly in the middle of a populated area that was actually quite beautiful. It was obviously very well-maintained and contained a number of absolutely gorgeous, colorful flowers, as well as a waterfall. I imagine it was built to help relieve businesspeople who feel cooped up during the day.

After an extremely confusing encounter with the subway, we ended up in another part of the city that had a lot of restaurants, so we decided to grab a bite to eat. Of course, we couldn't read any of the menus so we made our choice based on how populated the restaurant looked. This was kind of difficult as well, because it was lunchtime and all the resturants seemed pretty busy. We settled on an out-of-the-way place that had a huge fishtank.

Collyn ordered a pretty standard sweet-and-sour pork, which was on the menu in English so it was obviously a popular choice with Westerners. I attempted to order a fish meal, but something must have been lost in translation because I ended up with an enormous, whole crab covered in hot peppers. Not wanting to be rude I attempted to eat it anyway, which was an extremely messy process and I felt a little embarrassed because the Chinese have such polite table-manners.



After lunch, which was surprisingly expensive, we continued to wander aimlessly around the city. We stopped in a mall, just for something to do, but again, everything was Gucci and Fendi, so we didn't spend much time there. They had a movie theater and we considered seeing a Chinese movie just for the novelty of it, but once we saw the price of the tickets, we quickly reconsidered.

We came across a few more SAS students who seemed to be doing the same thing we were, but they had a Chinese friend with them who had studied in the United States. Finding a native guide is usually pretty exciting (see my experience in India), but unfortunately she wasn't too familiar with the city and eventually the group broke up and Collyn and I decided to make our way back to the ship.

That evening, I went out with a bunch of my friends and watched the famous Hong Kong light show from the best seat in the house: the MV Explorer! You can see a video of the light show here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHWmFkpondw. It was pretty neat and it lasted quite a long time. My friends I hung out on deck and chatted about the inevitable end of our trip, and then I headed to bed becasue I had a flight early the next morning.

BEIJING

My flight for Beijing left the next morning at 6 a.m., so the bus to take us to the airport arrived at 4. A bunch of the other students looked severly hungover, and my friend Forest almost didn't even make it because he was still ridiculously drunk. I was sent by his mom (who happened to be the nurse on board) to retrieve him, and then I accepted the responsibility of babysitting him and making sure he got on the plane -- a task that required more energy that I was prepared to expend at 4 in the morning.

Somehow we got on our flight and when we arrived, we had a full day of sightseeing planned aboard a tour bus. I've never been a big fan of tourbuses, and I guess I didn't realize that that's what my trip to Beijing would primarily consist of, so I was a bit disappointed. Our tour guide, who had given herself the American name Ashley, gave us quite a lot of interesting information though. She talked about intonations in Mandarin and how "ma", for example, could mean four or five things depending upon pronounciation.

The weather was surprisingly beautiful; the sun was out and bright, the sky was blue, and there was an incredible breeze. We later learned, however, that this type of weather is a bit of an anomaly. Usually Beijing is overcast due to the smog, so I felt very lucky.

Our first tour stop was lunch at a buffet style Chinese restaurant. I had very much been looking forward to trying Chinese food because I knew that the stuff they serve in America is only a loose replication of the real thing, and I was excited to try something authentic. Upon arriving at the restaurant, however, I quickly realized why authentic Chinese food has never been popular with Western palates. Pretty much every meal option had a number of cringe-worthy ingredients, like duck feet, goose blood, pig liver, etc. I felt especially bad for a vegetarian girl in my group because she was basically limited to having plain white rice for every meal.

After lunch, we were taken to the Summer Palace, which was originally built during the Jin Dynasty, but gained popularity during the Qing Dynasty when an emperor decided to beautify it for his mother's 60th birthday (aww). The buildings were very pretty, especially since the cherry blossoms were blooming, and like I mentioned, the weather was exquisite -- the problem was that it was incredibly overcrowded. We were supposed to follow our tour guide, who had a flag with a little toy panda attached to it, but there were so many other guides with similar flags that a group of us quickly got separated. I can say unreservedly that the avenues at this palace were more crowded than the streets of Hong Kong at lunchtime. It was ridiculous, and I couldn't wait to get back on the bus.

After this palace, we were taken to our hotel. A group of us decided to go out to dinner and explore the area a little more, so we all got dressed up and headed out. Embarrassingly enough, we had to walk out of the first three restaurants we went to because they could not cater to our vegetarian friend (we told them she was Buddhist, because the waiters couldn't understand "vegetarian"). We finally found a quiet restaurant that had an enormous menu with pictures and enough options that we could all find something to eat. We ended up ordering an extravagant amount of food (I think we were all really hungry since lunch was kind of a miss) and had an incredible meal where we were all sampling each other's dishes and passing things around. Compared to Hong Kong, the prices were great.

After, we meandered around and found a hole-in-the-wall Internet cafe. It was cool looking around the cafe because there were a bunch of teenage girls hanging around playing really fun-looking games with cute characters.

When our Internet needs were satisfied, most of the group decided to go out to see if they could find a bar or nightclub, but a few of us were really tired and headed back to the hotel (as tasty as it was, I don't think the Chinese food was sitting very well with me, and my stomach was kind of upset).

The next morning we were taken to the Great Wall, which was about an hour outside of the city. As touristy as it was, it was amazing. Our tour guide prepared us with a thorough history of the wall -- my favorite tidbit was that, instead of carrying dead workers' bodies down the hill, they simply built them into the stone! She said they estimated 20,000 bodies were treated this way, so it was definitely something I kept in mind while I was walking on it.

The climb up the hill toward the Wall was a little grueling -- sooo many stairs! But when we finally arrived on it, we stayed up there for two hours or so and ate a packed lunch. We took turns walking on the stone wall like a balance beam and took about a million pictures collectively.

Getting down from the Wall was an interesting experience: instead of more stairs, they had set up a sort of bobsled course (without the ice) as a gimmick. They had these little wheeled scooter-things that we sat down on and then sped down the hill. It was way too fun, even if it was a little silly.

After that, we had some time to wander around the marketplace at the foot of the hill and I got some fun souvenirs for my friends.

Then we packed into the tour bus and headed for a street market, but first we made a stop to see the Olympic stadiums! It was awesome to see the Bird's Nest right up close. We also saw the swimming arena and our tour guide explained the symbolism in the architecture (at this point, I can't really remember, but I believe it was designed to represent aspects of Taoist philosophy). A word about the Olympics: the Chinese seemed tremendously excited about hosting the Olympic games -- people everywhere were wearing Olympics t-shirts and sporting keychains with the little animal mascots (see a picture here: http://www.notcot.com/images/beijing_olympic_mascots-thumb.gif)

To be continued, I have to get back to work!