Quick Update

We've been doing a lot of traveling lately, so I haven't had much of a chance to keep you updated.

This last week has been a blur...and I am struggling to piece together everything that we did...

Monday we went and saw the terra-cotta warriors in Xi 'an. Our tour guide was a junior-high English teacher... and so she was treating us like little Chinese students... I have a strong aversion to being treated like a little Chinese student. She also repeated everything at least twice. Monday night we took a night train to Beijing.

Tuesday we went to Tian' an' men square and the Forbidden City. We also raided the local Carefour (similar to Walmart) and loaded up on clothes so that I wouldn't have to do any laundry on our ten day trip. I found lots of pairs of ugly shorts for 7.65 Yuan each and a bunch of other treasures.

Wednesday we loaded onto a bus to head to Microsoft (although we weren't very far away we had to leave two hours early because of the traffic). We were able to talk to the Manager of Research and Development (But the work done at the office we went to was mostly research). The main thing he emphasized was his belief that innovation is fundamentally a social process...meaning that things happen when multiple brilliant minds are given the chance and the environment to collaborate and think up new wonderful ideas. This means that I am going to need to continue figuring out how to work effectively in a team setting.

After our company visit we were free to discover Beijing on our own. We had a real fun walk from our hotel to the subway station (aproximately two hours) we were able to see another side of the city. We also stopped by some beautiful gardens to rest. I was on such a high as we rode in the back of some bikes that were modified to carry multiple people, but my mood went sour pretty fast when, upon arrival, the drivers changed our agreed upon price. Next we walked to find the underground city, only to find that it had been closed down for the Olympics, the final rough spot happened when some random Chinese guy insisted to take us to a nice restaurant, we told him that the first one was too expensive, so he took us to another one. We felt pretty bad telling him no again, and when the bill came we were surprised to find an additional 150 Yuan service charge. So I was in a pretty bad mood for a little while, okay, maybe I'm minimizing the length of time and the badness of the mood, but I got over it.

Thursday we finally got to climb the great wall. It was real fun and picturesque. There were two or three options of places on the wall we could have visited, so we went to the one that had the fewest tourists. It was the first hike of the trip I haven't over-exerted myself on. After the wall we had a five hour bus ride out to Chengde, a small city northish of Beijing. The scenery on the way was gorgeous (we could see parts of the great wall that hadn't been kept up) and we were able to do a little exploring alongside the road as our bus filled up on fuel. Out hotel in Chengde was a Tibetan style Temple/Cabin thing. Some of us wandered around later that night, I liked it because it felt like Thailand and there wasn't a strong tourism culture there.

Friday morning we had egg sandwiches (thinking back on them makes me shudder) and went to the Putuo Zongcheng Temple which was a pleasantly different from all the other temples that we have visited during our travels. Once we were done we went to the Summer Resort, where some of the ancient emperors would go during the summer to avoid the heat. Some of us rented an electric boat and went for a cruise on the "lake". Alyssa broke the steering wheel, and we had to be real creative to get our boat back to the dock. Six or seven hours later we were back in Beijing, and we had a real nice meal. The highlight of the meal was when the waiter brought out the frogs in a black trash bag to show us that they were still alive (fresh), one of them jumped out of the bag and the waiter barely caught it by a leg. Lucky for him because it was a really big frog, and the restaurant we were at was crowded.

Saturday we went shopping, and it was really really fun. There were so many people selling the same thing. I used the oversupply to my benefit, telling them that I wanted to look at the other stands before I bought from them (I really did), but they would grab my wrist, throw me against the wall and just keep lowering the price. I ended up with a nice soft-shell jacket, some jeans, and some nice ties for less than forty five U.S. dollars.

This morning we arrived in Nanjing on a nice sleeper train about 7:00 am. Luckily our director had arranged with our hotel here in Nanjing to check in early to degrease before church. At church, most of the BYU group was asked to share something we have learned while in China. I stumbled over my words, but in essence said that I am realizing that I have a long way to go, and that the idea of eternal progression is very comforting.

Hopefully I'll have a chance to unwind a little bit over then next week... This has been an excellent trip so far...