Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Road Trip
I put a lot on facebook, but here's most of the shots of me.
Runza: apparently a Nebraska thing. (Ground beef, cabbage, onion baked in bread.)
At AIC
At the bean
Feeling sad because the lookout point didn't really have a view
Found the view
Huge trees!
Hug a Redwood
Help!
Baby cougar
My llama and deer friends
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Changlish
So that concludes the basics of my China trip. I'll leave you now with some of the more hilarious attempts at English that were found.
And to those good ones that I couldn't get a picture of:
"No scribbling" (no graffiti)
On a woman's shirt: "A woman who daoesn't wear perfume has no future"
On another girl's shirt: "Power girl dies! never"
On the train bathroom doors: "No occupying while stabling"
and as always, the shirts with english "text" on them found randomly in stores. "A K H Y T F B A E R N" etc. Mash keyboard in caps + picture = cool shirt bro.
And to those good ones that I couldn't get a picture of:
"No scribbling" (no graffiti)
On a woman's shirt: "A woman who daoesn't wear perfume has no future"
On another girl's shirt: "Power girl dies! never"
On the train bathroom doors: "No occupying while stabling"
and as always, the shirts with english "text" on them found randomly in stores. "A K H Y T F B A E R N" etc. Mash keyboard in caps + picture = cool shirt bro.
Shanghai
Stepping off the airplane in to Shanghai was strange, because for some reason I felt like I should be stepping out back in Chicago. Though--Shanghai is so cosmopolitan, it was more like New York, if you were having a nightmare about being in New York and you can't read any signs or understand anyone.
Vincent drug us all down to the Bund, which felt a lot like Michigan Ave. He had to point out all the buildings along this strip, and who built them and when, etcetera, and it was a lot of Europeans in the 20s, so they all looked European and 20s-ish.
Then we crossed through People's Square on a little train-shaped bus cart thing (it's a long walk. I'm not sure where the Square part was, because it seemed like People's Really Long Street to me) to get to the Shanghai Art Museum, which is like the only museum in China.
Stanley took his sweet time leading us through 3 of the Musuem's exhibits, which was the equivalent to a days worth of lecture if the lecture was held in a meat locker, since that's about how warm it was inside.
By the end, Stanley was forced to resort to a falsetto British voice (one which Grace and Beatrice started at the beginning of the trip and slowly infected most everyone else with by the end). It was quite entertaining, and prompted his example of Stanley's lecture in Texan later that evening at dinner.
The food we had for dinner was invented by a bunch of monks who got sick of their boring veggie diets, and invented a style of cooking where they make vegetable dishes look and kind of taste like meat. I don't know how, I imagine some sort of witch doctor magic is involved.
Outside Shanghai there are a series of famous gardens, tucked away behind walls and houses in some town. For our shortest train ride, we picked the most comfortable one. It was sort of the Chinese bullet train, with well-reclining seats and tons of leg room. Best 25 minutes of travel.
For the first garden, Stanley led us through the "labarynth of stone" just to make sure we knew how to fully appreciate a garden. It was very hot, and since my sunglasses broke 2 days before, I was finally forced to get some fake Ray Bans from a stall nearby. At least they didn't say Roy Bons like some of the others we'd seen. The garden was awfully like the Chinese Garden in Portland, only bigger.. and actually Chinese.
We stumbled on a photo shoot.
The cracked ice pattern is for the "winter" part of the garden.
The majority of the group elected to go back early with Han, since they wanted to go shopping or on a boat tour or something. I stayed, and so did one other student, and both Stanley and Vincent. We went next to the Lion Grove garden, which was pretty much all rocks and a pond. That might sound boring, but I can assure you that I spent the entire 45 minutes we had there trying to find my way out. The garden was more of a playground than retreat. Once I started on the single path, I had no choice but to follow it down through caves, up stairs to pavilions, over bridges, under bridges, around the pond, through some water that was overflowing from the pond, up to more platforms, down through more caverns, and never once going the direction I intended.
We also got to ride in some of those rickshaw things because apparently it is impossible to get a taxi in that town.
Poor man had to get off the bike and haul us over a hill to get to the train station.
Anyway, that was the last thing we did as a group in Shanghai. It was a hot and tiring day at the end of a hot and tiring trip, so I just showered and stayed in that night. Got to watch the "international" channel because it was in English, and also because they were showing an episode of the Sing Off that On the Rocks was on. Then they played the news from 2010. They should probably get new material.
Vincent drug us all down to the Bund, which felt a lot like Michigan Ave. He had to point out all the buildings along this strip, and who built them and when, etcetera, and it was a lot of Europeans in the 20s, so they all looked European and 20s-ish.
Stanley took his sweet time leading us through 3 of the Musuem's exhibits, which was the equivalent to a days worth of lecture if the lecture was held in a meat locker, since that's about how warm it was inside.
By the end, Stanley was forced to resort to a falsetto British voice (one which Grace and Beatrice started at the beginning of the trip and slowly infected most everyone else with by the end). It was quite entertaining, and prompted his example of Stanley's lecture in Texan later that evening at dinner.
The food we had for dinner was invented by a bunch of monks who got sick of their boring veggie diets, and invented a style of cooking where they make vegetable dishes look and kind of taste like meat. I don't know how, I imagine some sort of witch doctor magic is involved.
Outside Shanghai there are a series of famous gardens, tucked away behind walls and houses in some town. For our shortest train ride, we picked the most comfortable one. It was sort of the Chinese bullet train, with well-reclining seats and tons of leg room. Best 25 minutes of travel.
For the first garden, Stanley led us through the "labarynth of stone" just to make sure we knew how to fully appreciate a garden. It was very hot, and since my sunglasses broke 2 days before, I was finally forced to get some fake Ray Bans from a stall nearby. At least they didn't say Roy Bons like some of the others we'd seen. The garden was awfully like the Chinese Garden in Portland, only bigger.. and actually Chinese.
The majority of the group elected to go back early with Han, since they wanted to go shopping or on a boat tour or something. I stayed, and so did one other student, and both Stanley and Vincent. We went next to the Lion Grove garden, which was pretty much all rocks and a pond. That might sound boring, but I can assure you that I spent the entire 45 minutes we had there trying to find my way out. The garden was more of a playground than retreat. Once I started on the single path, I had no choice but to follow it down through caves, up stairs to pavilions, over bridges, under bridges, around the pond, through some water that was overflowing from the pond, up to more platforms, down through more caverns, and never once going the direction I intended.
Anyway, that was the last thing we did as a group in Shanghai. It was a hot and tiring day at the end of a hot and tiring trip, so I just showered and stayed in that night. Got to watch the "international" channel because it was in English, and also because they were showing an episode of the Sing Off that On the Rocks was on. Then they played the news from 2010. They should probably get new material.
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