The City of Blinding Lights

大家好，Welcome to Shanghai!

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted – this past week has just been incredibly busy, with our PESI program orientation, the start of classes, and exploration trips around the city. Though its been only a few days, the program has already taken off on very good start. I studied Chinese political economy through my Berkeley coursework, but still I’ve been learning so much on top of all that just by actually being here in China and taking in a variety of perspectives, from our program directors to Fudan University professors to even Shanghai taxi drivers (its been quite interesting talking to these taxi drivers, they all have such unique histories and opinions on the present state of things swirling around them).

Anyways, I’ll talk about our program in the next post. For now, this is a series of night photos of Shanghai.

Conquering Huashan

大家好！

As promised, here is the post on our adventure up Huashan (or “Mt. Hua” in English, which simply doesn’t have as cool of a feel to it, because feelings are everything you know). Huashan is located about about two hours away from Xi’an by bus, and it is quite famous in China: it is known to be the toughest peak to hike among the “five great mountain peaks” of China. It’s also rumored to be the most dangerous hike in the world, but a quick search on Wikipedia finds that to be a questionable claim. Nonetheless, we’ll find out exactly how tough this hike is…

Xi’an, part 2

大家好！

The second part of our Xi’an trip consisted of further inquiry into China’s cultural history, since when it comes to China’s cultural history, Xi’an is where it’s at. Xi’an is also where George is at, so we were able to spend some more time with him. First we headed off in the morning to check out the city’s Museum of History and the Museum of Stone Tablets (Bei4ling2).

Sidenote: There’s something about this blog that I should point out. Some have remarked that my posts seem rather short and that I only seem to include one picture per post. That’s because posts that you see on my main page are actually only previews. On the bottom of each those postings, there’s a link that says “Keep Reading” – you have to click that link to view the entire entry. The link for this particular post appears right below this sentence. See?

Arrival in Xi’an

大家好！

We’re now at the second major destination of our trip: Xi’an – the cultural capital of China. While it is located quite far inland, away from all the major coastal cities, it contains a significant chunk of China’s historical sites and artifacts – Xi’an was actually the imperial capital of China for 13 dynasties, Beijing wasn’t the capital until much later.

Baffled In Beijing

大家好！

Sorry, I’m behind on updates right now, but I’ll be posting stuff as I put things together. It’s going to stay in chronological order, which means that posts going up won’t be covering things happening right now, but rather stuff that happened a couple of days ago. That’s just how it’s going to be until I catch up.

That said, I lost my phone as we were making our way out of Beijing on Saturday night. Actually, it wasn’t just that – long story:

Beijing, part 2

大家好！

This is our fourth day and last day in Beijing and we’re spending a good part of today just chilling at a local cafe. After the adventures of the past three days, its good to finally relax a bit, gather our thoughts, and prepare for the next leg of our trip, Xi’an.

The weather did finally clear up today because of the sudden rain last night. The city is not as smoggy/hazy looking anymore. Nice.

Beijing

We’ve arrived in Beijing.

Good Morning, China

大家好！

It’s no dream, I’m finally here. Right now I’m typing this on an overnight sleeper train, it’s 8 am and we’re about an hour or so from Beijing. It’s been about two days since we checked in at San Francisco Int’l, so there’s a lot to recap.

We left Grand Central a little past 2 am, early Monday morning. Marcus drove Johncai and me to SFO, while Carlton and Ivan came along as well. At the airport, we ended up in about three wrong lines and even a wrong terminal before finally getting ourselves checked in.

Thanks for the company guys! This photo is taken right as we were finally getting to be checked in, after spending about two hours waiting in the wrong lines. You may note a recent trend, when ridiculous things happen, Carlton is usually present (examples: Public Storage incident, midnight in Texas incident…etc).

Grand Central

Our mass migration into the Grand Central apartments is complete, thus making it the new hippest place to be in Alameda. To celebrate, we hosted a house-warming party and invited some of the staff to check it all out.

Okay, this has absolutely nothing to do with Grand Central, but I’ll include it first anyways. My peers forming “2008.” We sort of look like the Beijing 2008 Olympics logo…

Sierra Lodge

It’s been a while since I’ve updated as there hadn’t been much photography going on here until the recent few days. I’ve mostly been preparing for China (aka. cramming Chinese characters – I switched to learning just simplified now! Sorry to all my die-hard Taiwanese friends, I still love Taiwan though). On Monday night, Johncai and I went up to the Sierra Lodge with the Kangs and Kims for a couple of days to relax and hang out before we left for China, as it would be our last chance to spend some time with P.Manny and Sunny.

Breakfast on Tuesday morning. You can’t necessarily tell from this photo, but we ate WELL up there.