March « 2013 « Zack's Trip to China

It’s been awhile since I last updated this thing and since then I’ve seen and done a lot of cool things around Shanghai and other parts of China. I did take tons of pictures this past month (roughly 1200 pictures) but the internet has been so slow here that it normally takes 8 hours to upload 10 pictures and normally the internet crashes out by then. Even posting writing takes a few hours anymore. Therefore I’m sad to say I won’t be posting that many if any pictures for now on. This way I can still try to keep you guys updated on whats going on, but I do promise that when I get back I’ll post my pictures somewhere for all to see which most likely will be on Facebook. But for now I’ll try to tell you guys some of the main things I did this past month and hopefully fill in the missing pieces over the next few days.

To start off I am no longer at the campus in downtown Shanghai but have moved out to the main campus that is in the suburbs of Shanghai. The new place is called Minhang and is about 20 miles from the other campus and actually feels like a campus now. I do believe there are roughly about 35,000 undergrad and post-grad students here which is a little smaller than Purdue so I feel more back at home. Classes here haven’t been that bad yet except that for my thermo 2 class we were told on the first day that our first exam was in one week (No wonder they’re so damn smart). As for my class schedule I only have class Monday Tuesday and Thursday and am done on Monday and Tuesday by 10am, so really can’t be that schedule. The food here is a lot better than the previous campus except there is no place around campus to get western food. This might be a good thing though to help me keep losing weight. Which as of yesterday I weighed myself at 97kg which is equivalent to about 214 pounds. Which seeing that I came to China at 235 is a drastic weight lost in 2 months. Now for the rest of my month.

This past month I started to travel to other places around China which included Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Xi’an. The first two cities were pretty cool but the weather was really crappy and took away from the natural beauty of both areas. The two cities are both located about 2 to 3 hours away from Shanghai, with Suzhou being West of Shanghai and Hangzhou to the southwest. On that trip we mostly saw Buddhist temples, gardens, and some of the canals that ran through both cities. I saw both of those cities on a school provided tour so they were very quick sights but I do plan on making a trip out to Hangzhou again since most of the Chinese people believe it to be one of the most beautiful places in China.

Another big trip I took this month was during our spring break to Xi’an which is located in Central China and is home to Huashan mountain and the Terracota warriors. We spent a week there and had probably one of the best times of my life but at the same time some weird stuff kept happening to me and my friends and when I write about that trip sometime this coming week you guys will get more details. One of the coolest parts of this trip though was our adventure to the Muslim quarter of the city. They had some of the best Chinese food I have ever had and had this one desert that was made of rice dough. I know it sounds awful but it literally was a rice dough that tasted like a snickers candy bar. Another fun part of this trip was to Huashan mountain where me and my friends climbed for 3 hours until we had to turn around to get back to our bus. Sad thing was we thought we made it far up the mountain but discovered we only made it a third of the way up.

As for now this is all I am going to write about for now and will fill in the gaps this coming week. I most apologize again for not posting more often but now that I have more free time the blog should pick up again. I am going to try and get five photos up here now as a teaser and I must warn you that in some pictures it looks as if I grew out a Hitler mustache. In reality I had a mustache but the problem was my inner hair grows twice as dark as the outside and some of you might ask why I grew a mustache in the first place. Lets just say I made a drunken bet but after seeing some of these pics (which most I deleted) I decided to shave it off to hide the embarrassment.