I am so excited to tell you about my adventures in China! Visiting China was especially meaningful for me because my Mom, Mrs. Isaak, went to China when she did Semester at Sea in 1981! I have heard all her stories and was excited to see the places she described to me.
The MV Explorer docked in Shanghai, but on my second day I travelled with a tour group to Beijing. It was about a two hour plane flight. It was kind of chilly in Shanghai, but it was very cold in Beijing! Probably almost as cold as it is in Bancroft is right now, although there was definitely less snow.
In Beijing we took a bus to the Great Wall of China! In total, we hiked about 20 km over the course of two days. We started in the Gubeikou section, which is one of the oldest parts of the wall, close to 2000 years old. A lot of the Wall in this section was falling down. During the second day, we were in the Jinshanling section and hiked towards the Simatai section, which was only built about 600 years ago, and has been preserved much more.
Some sections of the Wall were very narrow or very steep! At a couple points, I was using my hands to make sure I didn't fall backwards.
On the afternoon of my second day in Beijing, we went to the Forbidden City. It was constructed from 1406 to 1420, and there are 980 buildings surrounded by walls. The Emperor of China used to live in the Forbidden City with his family, and up until 1912, no common people were allowed inside! Even if you climbed a tree to peek over the walls, you could be executed! Another interesting fact I learned is that the colour of the roof of a building was very important in ancient China. You were only allowed to have a gold-coloured roof if you were very important, like the Emperor. Everyone else has to have grey roofs.
In China I continued to work on my chopstick skills! All the restaurants I went to were "family style", which means the table was round and there was a giant spinning disc on the middle of the table. The waiters would bring out many, many plates of food and we would have to use our chopsticks to pick what we wanted and put it on our own plate! I ate Peking duck, a famously delicious way to cook duck, and potatoes covered in carmel, which were very tasty.
While in China I also tried lots of different types of tea. I am used to making tea with a teabag and hot water, but making tea in China is an art. There was this one kind of tea made with small ball of tea leaves and a flower compressed into a small the size of a ping-pong ball. When you pour hot water on it, the flower opens up! It was delicious and beautiful.
As you may remember when I visited in December, I have blonde hair and blue eyes. While this is very normal in Bancroft, in some places in China seeing someone with blonde hair is very unusual. Often in the city Chinese people would ask to take our picture because they had never seen someone who looks different from them! While we were Beijing, a mother asked me if I would take a photo with her little daughter. It is interesting to think about the differences like this between Canada and China.
After Beijing my group flew to Hong Kong. Did you know that Hong Kong is technically separate from China? There is a different government and different money. The lights of the city were unbelievable! It felt like when the sun went away the city lights were just as bright!
Tomorrow we will be arriving in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh City is the biggest city in Vietnam, and the weather says it is going to around 25 degrees Celsius! It is going to be very strange to be going from cold Beijing to very hot Vietnam!
Rebecca
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