March 17: Our Weekend Away & Gavi's Monday

Ayden Writes:

For today’s blog entry, I will be writing about what I did this weekend. This weekend I went to Luoyang. It took five hours to get there in a minibus. When I looked out the minibus window, I saw fields with crops and farmers planting crops. It was 12:00 AM when we arrived in Luoyang.

We stayed in a fancy hotel in Luoyang. The next morning we went down to the breakfast buffet. The first thing I saw was corn flakes. My eyes lit up because I have not had American cereal in a while.

After breakfast, we got into the minibus with our tour guide. We drove to the White Horse Temple. It is a Buddhist temple. We saw many Buddha statues. Next we went to the Shaolin Si, the Kung Fu school. We watched the Kung Fu show. My favorite part was when a warrior monk took a piece of metal and broke it with his head. Another cool part was when another warrior monk took a sewing needle and pushed it through a large glass square and popped a balloon with the needle. The glass was left with a hole the size of a sewing needle. After the show, we walked to the Temple at the school and saw basically the same things we saw at the White Horse Temple.

On Sunday we went to a costume museum, it had exhibits of what people wore and wear in China. We were going to see a shadow puppet show but the Museum had no electricity so the show was cancelled. After the Museum, we went to the Longmen Caves. We saw many Buddhas at the caves. Many people wanted to take pictures with me and my brother and sister. Taking pictures with Chinese strangers felt a bit odd and sort of fun. After the caves we took a boat back to the main entrance. We then hopped into our minibus and went to lunch. After lunch, we went home. It was a really fun trip.

Gavi Writes:

Hi Everyone,
Today was pretty much a normal school day for me well, as normal as they get here. I was a little late to school because my dad accidentally locked me out of the room with my shoes, backpack, and cell phone before going down to breakfast. So I had to walk down-stairs and then outside to the dining hall in my sister’s slippers which didn’t fit at all and get the keys. The students and school guards, who usually stare at me because I am Caucasian and have curly hair, which is rare here, gave me even more weird looks then usual. I am starting to get used to people staring at me everywhere with looks of amazement on their faces but these looks weren’t ones of amazement, just confusion.

Once at school I had English class, then Chinese, then we had flag raising, then Math then English again. After Chinese school, I went back to the high school campus to eat lunch and then play soccer with the BHS students. After lunch we had a history class and Jennifer did her presentation on the chapters she was assigned from Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China. Then I had my Chinese class. Today instead of having the usual sit down Chinese class, Zhou Lou Shi and I went outside and just talked in Chinese. He was really surprised to hear that I wasn’t allowed to bike in China because of the lack of helmets. His response to my telling him that most people in America always wore helmets was that they must not be very good at riding bikes.

For cultural class today we had Kung-fu. We used swords again today and learned a really cool routine. It consists of a lot of swinging the sword around your head and then trusting it forward really fast. It was really fun to do but many people came very close to getting hit. After cultural class I went back up to my room and did a little homework. Then, because it’s my parent’s anniversary, we all went out for hot pot. We were fairly successful in ordering what we intended to order however the waitress did at one point bring us a platter of entire fish on sticks which I don’t believer we ordered, but you never really know. After dinner we all went back to the dorms and I did more homework. So to sum it all up it was just another day here in Xi’an China.

More later,
Gavi