Ski Trip!

The area by the cabins 

Fresh powder in the morning!

With some new friends at the waterpark

Some of our group on top of the mountain

Last weekend was the Lunar New Year, which is of course, a big deal in Asian countries.  For the holiday, we had both Monday and Tuesday off of work - our last long weekend in Korea!  We were thinking about what to do and at the last minute decided to go on a ski trip.  It was organized by a tour group called Adventure Korea (they cater to foreigners living in Korea and organize lots of ski trips, hiking trips, etc.) and about 80 westerners went on the trip.  Our friend, Kelly (who we met in China), was going and invited us to tag along.

We left Saturday morning and spent two nights at the Phoenix Park ski area and one at some cabins in the mountains.  The ski area was fairly small but  had some decent runs.  The great thing about it was that it was empty!  The Lunar New Year is a family deal, so most Koreans stay at home rather than doing things like going skiing.  It was great to get up boarding here, even though it was really cold, windy and snowing the the runs were icy.  Because of all of that, I didn't last as long as I normally would have.  Oh, and we got to do night skiing, which I have never done before.  Our passes were only valid until 10:30pm, but the skiing goes all the way until 4am.  

The best part of the trip was all the great people that we met.  We stayed in a hostel (which was right on the mountain.  Have you ever seen a hostel that you could ski out the back door to the gondola?) and had to share a room with about 5 other people.  Fortunately, the people we ended up rooming with were awesome and we spent the whole weekend with them. Two more people joined our room in our cabin and they were just as great.  We all had a ton of fun together just hanging out and laughing all night.  

It was a great trip and I'l glad that it will serve as one of the last memories of what we did in Korea.  

Photos.

Beijing!

By the time we got to Beijing, I was exhausted after a long night of no sleep on the train.  We got to our beautiful little hostel, and luckily they had a room ready for us.  So I had to lay down and take a loooong nap before setting out.  And it was soo cold out!  The whole time we were in Beijing we were just freezing cold.  We put on as many layers as we could (I could barely move my arms I was wearing so much) and were still cold the instant we stepped outside.  I will never again travel to somewhere in the middle of winter to go site seeing.  If you're going to a cold place to go skiing, that's a different story.  But trust me, don't go to Beijing in the middle of winter!

We did SO many great things in Beijing and I just don't feel like I can talk about them all here.  Plus I'm sure you don't want to read every last detail of everything we did there.  So here are some of the high lights:  We visited Tianamen Square (largest public square in the world), the Forbidden City, the Lama Temple (one of my favorite things, so beautiful), the Summer Palace (where the emperor would stay in the summer to get away from the Forbidden City), the Olympic area, night food markets, shopping markets, Beihai Park, Temple of Heaven (another one of my favorites), and the Great Wall.  

But really, one of the best parts of Beijing was all the wonderful people we met.  Our hostel was so great and had such a warm atmosphere and it seemed to attract really awesome people.  Going back to the hostel after a long day out in the cold felt like coming home.  Everyone who was staying there would hang out in the enclosed courtyard, so it was easy to meet lots of people.  We met people from all over the world: many people who were also teaching English in Korea (one of whom we've seen a couple times since we've been back), people doing around the world trips, people on their regular vacations, several Brits who had taken the Trans-Siberian train over, a travel photographer, etc...  Everyone was so, so great.  We all would go out to dinner together every night or just hang out and have some drinks at the hostel.  They made the trip what it was!

I think for Beijing I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves mostly.  Everything was really fantastic, but I just don't think I can put it all into words here.  One thing I'll comment on is the Great Wall.  It was really nice and pretty impressive, but somehow I didn't get that really amazed feeling that I thought I would have gotten.  Like when I've been to Machu Picchu, or the Acropolis, all I can think to say is "wow."  But when I got to the Great Wall, all I could think was, "Okay, that's the wall."  I still enjoyed it and am glad that I can say I've been there, but I wasn't as impressed as I would hope to be.  Maybe it was the smoggy air that day (it was clear blue skies all the other days), the hassle we had getting over there, or just the fact that you can't see a ton of it at  the same time, but it just didn't do it for me.  But we still had a great time walking around it and taking lots of photos.  

However I did get the "wow" factor with some of the other places we went in Beijing, like the Temple of Heaven and the Lama Temple.  The Temple of Heaven was so beautiful:  a round temple, how different!  And the ceiling inside the temple was so detailed and really incredible.  And, even more incredible, is the fact that the temple was constructed completely free of nails or screws or anything.  Only wood holding it together.  And the most impressive part of the Lama Temple was the 18 meter high buddha housed in the final building of the temple.  Truly amazing.  

Oh, one more thing I have to tell about in Beijing is the night market!  Our first night in Beijing we went to the night market with a big group of around 10 people from our hostel.  There is a street lined with vendors selling all sorts of crazy foods.  We saw things such as scorpions, snakes, lizards, sea horses, dog, silk worm larvae, crickets, beetles, octopus, sea urchins and every part of the animal you can imagine (including unmentionable parts of sheep, which make you strong according to the salesmen...).  I was not so brave and opted not to try anything.  However one of the guys we were with was the extreme opposite of me and would try anything.  So he got some silk worm larvae, scorpion and dog to share with anyone that would try it.  Jason tried a piece of dog (I can't really forgive him for that one), and many other people tried everything else.  They said the scorpions tasted like fish, but decided that was probably just from the flavor of the oil that they were deep fried in.  

So anyway, check out the pictures here for more.  

More Xi'an

After visiting the warriors (that took up most of the day), we went back to the city and decided to do some more exploring while we had some daylight. We went up onto the city walls, which encircle all of the original city and are surrounded by a moat. The walls are BIG. They're probably 20 meters high and about 10 meters wide at the top - thicker at the bottom. You can rent bikes on top of the walls and ride around, which looked like great fun if it weren't so cold. So instead, we just walked around for a little bit and enjoyed the sights from high off the ground.

Later that night, we went with some other people we met on our warrior tour (they're also English teachers in Korea) to see and water and light show. The show is supposed to be China's biggest water show, but it really wasn't anything to brag about. I got bored of it after about a minute (especially because it was so cold! See a theme here?). But the show was located in a plaza next to the Big Goose Pagoda, one of Xi'an's most famous sites. So at least we got to see a nice attraction while we were there.

After the water show, I started feeling my cold rise up again. So I ended up spending the rest of the night and most of the next day in bed. There was a lot more things that I wanted to see in Xi'an that I didn't get to. The next day while I was laying in bed trying to get better, I decided to take part in an ancient Chinese tradition: acupuncture. The hostel I was staying at had a Chinese doctor that could come and preform various Chinese treatments, such as acupuncture, cupping, toxin scraping and massage. My back was really bothering me and I had the cold and I knew this was going to be the cheapest acupuncture I could ever get, so I went for it. I got a little freaked out when he quickly jabbed a needle in my cheek and then poked it around a little bit. He put four needles in me (two in my face, two in my back) and it was a little scary, but I got through it and had my first acupuncture experience.

That night, we took an overnight train from Xi'an to Beijing. It took about 11 hours and we got beds in a "soft sleeper." There were 4 bunks in our little room which we shared with a Chinese man and woman. They went to sleep right away and Jason and I tried to go to sleep after about an hour or so. Lucky Jason slept through the night just fine, but I hardly slept a wink. It didn't help being sick, and then our car got incredibly hot and I was sweating all night long. And with the noise from the tracks and being jerked around, it just wasn't a good combination of things...

The Terracotta Warriors

The next day, our first full day in Xi'an, we headed out with a tour group from our hostel to the terracotta warriors. For those of you who don't know of the terracotta warriors, a little history lesson for ya:

The warriors were constructed by Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor to unite China. They say there are around 8000 warriors (they're still excavating). They were built because the emperor believed that he would still rule China in his afterlife and needed an army to help him (our tour guide kept telling us that he was crazy). One of the best known facts about the army is that no two warriors are the same. Each person was originally holding their own weapons, but they were made of wood so they disintegrated long ago (same with several chariots made of wood). Everything was painted life like colors, but after 2000 years of being underground, the paint on the clay vanished almost instantly when they were dug up and exposed to air. Each warrior is life size and was constructed after an actual person, so each one's facial features - and even hair styles - are unique. And when the army was finished being constructed, the emperor had all of the workers killed so that no one would know the secret of the army and come and destroy it. Probably one of the reasons it stayed so well preserved for so long.

The army wasn't discovered until 2000 years after it was constructed. In 1974, a peasant was digging a well and dug up a warrior's head. Our tour guide told us that the government paid him 10 yuan (about $1.25) for his find, since they had no idea what it would lead to. But he has since been well taken care of, being provided a great house, not having to work, and meeting leaders from around the world (Including our very own Bill Clinton). The man is now about 85 years old and hangs out in one of the buildings on the warrior compound almost every day, and we actually got to see him.


It was about an hour drive out to the site from our hostel. The grounds that the warriors are located on are pretty expansive, and we did a lot of walking. The first thing we made our way to was a building that houses a couple bronze chariots as well as many examples of the weapons that the warriors held. The bronze chariots were really nice and detailed. They are built a quarter of the actual size, because the emperor believed that when he got to heaven they would expand to full size to meet his needs.

From there we went to a little cinema which has a short film detailing some of the history of the warriors. It was all in English and didn't even have Chinese subtitles. Guess they know who their audience is. (This is where we got to see the man who discovered the warriors. He was sitting behind a table with a big "No Photos" sign on it.)

From there we moved on to Pit one, the biggest of the 3 pits where the warriors are located. The room is about as long as a football field and there are about 6000 warriors and horses, all standing in battle formation. Pit 2 is the smallest area, with only 72 warriors and is believed to be the army headquarters because of so many high ranking generals that were found in this area. Pit 3 is decently large, but most of the warriors haven't been unearthed yet. But there are apparently about 1300 warriors in this area. Also in Pit 3, they have a couple warriors enclosed in glass cases, so you can get up close to them and really see all the detail (even the tread on the bottoms of their shoes is unique!). They have even been able to preserve a little bit of paint on a couple of the warriors.

Xi'an

Leaving Shanghai, we got off to a bumpy start. We had booked a cheap flight to Xi'an on a small Chinese airline which we found online. We went to the airport and found our ticket counter to find out that, oh no, our flight had been canceled! The woman at the counter seemed surprised we didn't know: "Oh, nobody told you? Well, sorry..." She directed us to the help counter and they put us on a flight on China Eastern Airlines (the same airline we took from Korea) which was leaving at the same time and didn't charge us any extra. So it ended up working just fine, but did give us a little scare. The train between Shanghai and Xi'an is about 20 hours, so we we're really hoping to not be subjected to that. Also, the airports in China were strangely quiet and empty. For a country with the biggest population in the world, you would expect the airports to be a little bit hectic. But in every city we visited, they we're quiet, dark and empty.

We flew to Xi'an and arrived there mid afternoon. From the airport, we had to take a hour and 1/2 bus ride into the city. The province that Xi'an is in is pretty small compared to some of the other Chinese provinces. Xi'an is the biggest city in the province at I believe 3.62 million people. But the whole province is about 62 million people. Driving from the airport, I just really found it hard to believe that that many people are hiding in there. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but that hour drive seemed very eerie to me. The sky was incredibly hazy and almost seemed to blend into the dirty, dust covered ground. Much of the area that we drove through was filled with factories and high rise apartments, but it seemed just empty. We were driving on a big highway but were accompanied by few other cars. I didn't see any people out walking on the streets or around the apartments. The buildings looked un-lived in from the outside. There were no cars driving down the streets. It really felt like a ghost town to me. And just left me wondering, where are those 62 million people??

Anyway, after the odd bus ride into town, I eventually did start to see more people and it turned into the small, touristy city of Xi'an. Xi'an is filled with ancient Chinese history and was once the capital of China. The main area of the city (the original city) is surrounded by great, tall city walls. Our little hostel was located right next to the walls, by one of the main gates. It was such a wonderful place, with the best staff you could ask for, a delicious restaurant and great bar (and they offered free beers and tea everyday... beat that!) and comfortable rooms. I really loved this place, and the staff ended up being incredibly helpful to us.

After finding our place and getting settled in, we set out to explore the Muslim quarter in the late afternoon light. Xi'an apparently has a big Muslim history, and the Muslim quarter is now filled with street vendors and hole in the wall shops and restaurants. There's also a mosque in the area that I wanted to visit, but we ran out of time to go back. We peeked in the door at night but it wasn't lit up. But from what I could tell, it looked just like other Chinese temples. So we walked around and explored it all for a while and found some good little gifts.

On a side note: the way you have to bargain with vendors in China is amazing. They inflate their prices so greatly that most guidebooks will recommend you give your starting price at about 10% of what they are asking. We had people go down in price from about 600 yuan all the way to 20 yuan. (That's about $90 down to about $2.50). I've traveled around and done my share of bargaining, but nothing like I experienced in China. You learned to just ignore what their initial price was and decide about how much you would be willing to spend. Then when they're not going to your price start walking away, and 9 times out of ten, they will chase after you and agree to it. It's quite the experience.

After the Muslim quarter, we got some delicious, authentic Chinese food and a small restaurant with no English that our hostel recommended. I got chicken with peanuts (I had it a few other times throughout the trip as well) and was really surprised at how much the Chinese food in China tasted like the Chinese food in America! And we definitely weren't in touristy restaurants catering to foreigners, it was the real deal. It made me glad to know that they don't over Americanize all the food they serve in the States.

Check out Xi'an photos here.

Shanghai Day 2

Our first night in Shanghai we were SO exhausted... or at least I was. By the time I woke up the next morning my throat was starting to hurt a little bit. I was hoping it was just from the cold and would go away over the course of the day, but it didn't.

Anyway, we started off the day by visiting a temple right by our hostel called the Jing-an Temple. It's a very ancient temple (from around 600 AD or something), but has been moved, burned down and restored many times. So by now, it doesn't look quite so old. It actually seems really pretty new. It was under construction while we were there. There were people working everywhere and the pleasant Buddhist sound of buzz saws filling the air. Despite all of that, it actually was a pretty little temple. It had these ornate staircases and wood carved windows and things. But once we went inside a couple of the buildings that tourists could go in, they were just big cement rooms with a couple Buddha statues thrown in. Very odd. There were, however, practicing monks there. And we saw them come out from their chanting to light some incense.

After the temple, we wandered through some parks for a bit before making our way over to the Shanghai museum, which is supposed to be one of the best museums in China.

At this point I was really starting to not feel well, so we didn't explore the museum very in depth and enjoy it as much as we would have if I was well. But, we did see some really great Buddhist statues, beautiful Chinese ceramics and great ancient scrolls. It was really nice and everything was impressively old. And there were many statues that I've seen copies of through out my lifetime, always cool to see the real thing. (Like this horse... beautiful).

We had planned to go have a drink in the bottle opener building that evening. Apparently, there is a bar on like the 87th floor. Oh and did I mention that this is the tallest building in China? I was really excited for it, to feel fancy, have a nice drink and admire the beautiful city lights from way up high. But, unfortunately, I just wasn't feeling well enough. So instead, we spent the rest of the evening hulled up in our hostel watching movies.

Shanghai!

China: What a great, whirlwind trip! Everything about it was kind of amazing. We saw so many great and interesting sights, met wonderful people, had new experiences, ate great food, etc. Everything went smoothly and we didn't have any real problems...... except for the fact that it was freezing cold and we both got sick! I was sick for about the first 4 or 5 days of the trip and then Jason was sick for the second half. It was mostly just sinus and chest colds, but it wiped us of our energy and did mean spending a couple days laying in bed rather than being out enjoying our trip. But that aside, it was all great. But before I get ahead of myself, let me start back at the beginning......

We left Seoul and flew to Shanghai early Christmas morning. It was the most un-Christmasy Christmas I've ever had. I think for most of it we even forgot that it was supposed to be a special day. But that was just fine, because we were thoroughly enjoying what we were doing.

First off when we got to Shanghai, we had some slight problems getting through security. Jason's passport picture is about 8 years old, and his looks have changed quite a bit over that time. The customs officer who checked his passport wouldn't believe he was the same person as the picture. He had to call over two managers to check it out and finally let Jason through when he showed his US drivers license and his Korean ID card. Ended up not being a problem, but it did make me a little nervous for a minute. There haven't been any issues anywhere else we've been, but as we came to find out, China seems to be super strict with their security.

After dealing with the problems in customs, we took a high speed train from the airport into the city. It went 30 km in less than 8 minutes and got up to a top speed of 431 km/hour. (For those of you who don't think in metric, that's a distance of about 19 miles and a speed of 267 miles/hour). It was so fast, it gave me a headache and made the cars outside look like they were moving backwards. Insane. And this train isn't for long distances, just to and from the airport.

After finding our little hostel in Shanghai, we set out to explore the city. We headed over to the Bund, Shanghai's European area, to check out the famous skyline. It was definitely a picturesque sight and we were amazing but all the different architecture. My favorite building was the tallest building in China, which we named "The Bottle Opener" (See photos). But there were other good buildings as well, such as "The Taser" and "The Rocket Launcher." Also, there were tons of people there wandering around trying to sell kites, keychains, jewelry, knicknacks, food, etc. (My favorite was a guy that had a grill built into the back of his bicycle and was roasting some kind of meat on a stick. Again, see photos). But apparently it's highly illegal for them to do so, because every once in a while they would all get up quickly and take off running. We never even saw any cops.

From The Bund, we wandered through some parks and made our way to Old Town to see the Yuyuan Gardens and shopping area. Very touristy area filled with loads of shops where you can buy just about any kind of souvenir imaginable. I got a couple good ones, including a mini glass vase that was hand painted on the inside and Jason bought me a pearl necklace with an inscription engraved on it so small that you have to use a magnifying glass to read it. In this area, people come up to you and try to get you into their back alley secret stores by saying, "Watch? Bag?" The first time I heard it, I thought they said, "Watch your bag," and I clutched my purse and started looking around for a thief.

The gardens themselves were nice, although I imagine they would be a lot more beautiful in the summer when everything is in bloom. They were mostly rock formations and pools surrounded by nicely decorated walls and creative doorways. We spent a while wandering around and really enjoying the beauty. But by the time we were done, we were freezing! While it wasn't as cold in Shanghai as it was in Xi'an and Beijing, it was still cold enough to really be feeling it after quite a few hours outside. So we decided a nice hot chocolate and the comfy chairs of Starbucks wre in order. Yeah, I know, hanging out in Starbucks on our first day in China, but we were really cold! And there was no where else good to warm up. Even the restaurant we ate lunch in was really cold...

After taking some good night photos of Old Town and the skyline, we made our way back to our hostel and after a few rounds of ping pong called it a night...

Check out all the Shanghai photos here.