Introduction to Yunnan Trip

From January 15th to January 29th, I travelled through China’s southernmost province: Yunnan. Yunnan borders Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar (formerly Burma). I travelled all over the province, racking up more than 60 hours of bus time. We started in the provincial capital of Kunming, drove south to the border of China and Myanmar, drove north to the Tibetan autonomous region, and finished the trip with an overnight train back to Kunming. Yunnan is incredibly diverse…

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On the plane ride over…

This post was written on January 7th on the plane (somewhere over Russia).  I’m currently on hour 3 of my 14 hour flight from Chicago to Beijing, heading back to China because I just couldn’t get enough of it the first time. I spent a three week hiatus from my Chinese life in good ole’ Des Moines, Iowa. There I was kept perennially busy by a confluence of family and friends. I had a few…

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Introduction to Spring Semester

Anastasiataber.com has been silent for two months. The silence ends now. I have a few posts for you, one I wrote on the plane ride over from China on January 8th and another introducing you to my 16 day excursion in Yunnan Province that took place January 15-29. It is my goal to write posts for every day experienced on the Yunnan trip, which was amazing just in case you were wondering. As always, I…

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The Chinese Millennials—How a Generation Views Its Country

I am writing this post before I travel during the National Holiday. For those of you who don’t know what that is, the National Holiday is an annual government-sanctioned holiday that occurs every October. Usually the holiday lasts seven days, but the dates aren’t ever clear until about a month before, and this year the government surprised everyone by giving nine days off, not seven. The number of days off supposedly corresponds with how well…

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This semester has changed my life

This semester has changed my life. From a young age I have read books as a way to gather knowledge about the world. Both of my parents share an ardent love of books; my dad a passionate devotee to non-fiction, my mother with her perennial stack of bedside fiction that never seems to shrink despite constant reading. Growing up, my mother filled the house with movies and TV shows, and some of my fondest memories…

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The Broken Bridge

Getting a cab back was tricky—we had to downgrade to a three-wheeler. It was probably the jankiest car I will ever travel in. It only had three wheels and the motor groaned when it tried traveling faster than 30 miles per hour. When you are in China, you usually want to avoid these “unofficial” taxis like the plague, but since I was with my Chinese friends I figured I was in safe hands. We arrived…

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Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea

After visiting the Great Wall in Dandong, we took the bus back to town. The bus didn’t have any seats left, so we sat in the bus-equivalent of a trunk, behind the last row of seats. I’m not quite sure if that’s legal, or safe, but I chalk it up to a “when in Rome” sort of situation. Apparently the ticket taker asked my friends if I was American. Most of the people on the…

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On the Border of North Korea

We left the hotel to go to the train station to buy tickets to Dalian. We also bought 6 kuai tickets (roughly one dollar) to get to the Great Wall. Dandong is the start of the Great Wall in China, and it was especially cool for me to visit there because 1) I’ve now seen the Great Wall in five different places; 2) I’ve visited the farthest west part of the Great Wall (the fort…

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Chinese Millennials Reaction to Steve Jobs’ Death

I wrote in my journal one day, “Today is one of those days where I say, ‘Wow, all that really happened?’” That was the day I visited Dandong, a city on the border of North Korea and China. I was travelling with my Chinese roommate and her friends during the National Holiday period—basically a weeklong holiday that occurs every October and is meant to encourage Chinese people to travel and pump some spending money into…

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This is China

A man walks up to you and your friends, says “Hello,” looks away from you, but still stands right next to you. You quickly look around for his friend’s camera taking an opportunistic shot, but you can’t find it. The guy is standing next to you just for the hell of it.  “This is weird,” your friend says. “No,” you reply. “This is China.” So many moments occur on a daily basis here that are…

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