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…
(Part one and two were written together, but are too long to post together. Here is the link for part one.) The train seats weren’t half bad. I played a few games with the students beside me (the games “What am I?” and “Bullshit”), read Foundation by Isacc Asimov, journaled, didn’t sleep, and visited a friend for two hours in another car. My friend was talking to a 13 year old Chinese girl, and occasionally…
(Part one and two were written together, but are too long to post together. Here is the link for part two.) My group of friends and I decided that today definitely felt like week five, as opposed to day five. I am already in my third town, a small city of three million (yes, in China that is small) called Lanzhou. It is in the middle of the China, and the Yellow River runs directly…
(Part one and two were written together, but are too long to post together. Here is the link for part one.) Back to my busy and fruitful days. After the caves, a few of my friends and I took advantage of the opportunity to see a Chinese acrobatic show. The story was very interesting, and very Chinese: A woman is sought out by the Fire Devil, but a shepherd comes and saves her by hiding her in…
(Part one and two were written together, but are too long to post together. Here is the link for part two.) I’m already at the point where I can’t remember where I’ve left off. Every day seems much longer than 24 hours (sleeping twice a day may have something to do with that). I was afraid that experiencing so much in so little time would make each part less exciting than if I had spaced…
(Author Note: Day Five, Aug. 24th, 2011: I finally have ethernet in the hotel. All of the Silk Road trip blog posts are written on a daily basis, but posted only when I get internet, so please refer to the time phrases as having written them at the time.) Yesterday I embarked on an ancient journey that used to take traders of all races through China. Since I am in group B, I get to…
After the day I had yesterday, last night my mind and body felt like pudding. We climbed the Great Wall yesterday, which is actually quite a climb from where we started. I didn’t count the steps but it easily racks up to a couple thousand. One thing about climbing the Great Wall is that you are always climbing—once you think you’ve reached the top, you spot an even higher tower daring you to climb it….
This is the third day that I have woken up at 5:30 in the morning. This morning was much more pleasant though, since, unlike yesterday, I didn’t have mosquitoes buzzing in my ear and no one played basketball until after I had woken up. (Apparently the Chinese like their basketball…at ALL hours of the day) The mosquitoes hadn’t left the room this morning—I killed a big juicy one with my gargantuan roll of 卫生纸 aka…