May 13 Xi'an

May 14, 2017

Today brought us to the end of our time in Guangzhou. After enjoying some bacon this morning at breakfast, we packed up the bus and headed to the airport. There we boarded a plane to head to Xi'An. As we started our decent, we noticed we were finally getting into some farm ground and are looking forward to the agricultural tours that lie ahead.

As we are almost a week into our travels, we decided it was time to reflect on some of the things we have experienced in comparison to the United States. We have noticed all of the high rising buildings and structures seem very worn down and old in comparison to the young age of these infrastructures. The quality of the building materials makes the engineering wear down very quickly compared to our long standing buildings at home. The scaffoldings we see around these work sites are made of bamboo and seem to be tied together.

We have also found that the Chinese people are always in a hurry. When waiting for buses, trains, and getting off airplanes they rush into a crowd with a sense of urgency. This has taken some time to get used to from the slower paces back home.

Upon arrival in Xi'An, we visited The Old City Wall. The wall makes up the borders of the old city, measuring 12-14 meters in height. We rode tandem style bikes all around the top of the wall, covering 8 miles. Some of the brick pavers had old Chinese characters carved in them, dating back nearly 1700 years. The wall only took 7 years to build. Between the brick pavers is a mixture of rice and gravel.

Tonight we went to The Tang Palace Dance Show, where performers entertained us with songs and dances. Dances represented different seasons of the year, dancers came out in very beautiful traditional customers during each of the different performances. Musical songs represented the different dynasties throughout Chinese history. Dancing in spring fields with young girls looking forward to a nice and happy life is one of the performances present and also a crowd favorite. Andrew Berg hopes that his dance class at SDSU next fall includes some of these stylings.

After the theatre performance we enjoyed a traditional dumpling dinner. Xi'An is known for its love for dumplings. We tasted 18 different flavors. Flavors included pork, sweet potato, spicy chicken, and many more. A surprising one was the goldfish dumpling! One of the best things, though, was that our tour guide Maggie had a surprise birthday cake & paper crown for Sam Pratt, and we all got some – our only dessert since leaving SD.

On a lighter note, we are attempting to learn some Mandarin. Our tour guide tried to teach us how to say 'I don't understand' but to our understanding and spelling, it is pronounced "Wa Boo Dong." Hayden informed us if you pronounce words loud and slow there is a higher chance the local people will understand...theories are proving otherwise.

To (hopefully) be continued...