well i'm back from the two week vacation we took around china, it was pretty incredible. first off, lemme say that you can't really grasp china's population problem till you travel around. for example, we went to the northeast part of china, what used to be manchuria, and visited this city i'd barely heard of, called shenyang, which happened to have over 10 million residents. i mean, come on now.

the itinerary (for illustrations see the pictures that i'll hopefully put up soon):

beijing - we first took a train to beijing (24 hours) and spent a day there; we didn't really do much of note except eat peking duck, which was really really arughfhwughaaaa....

northeast - from beijing we took a train to the northeast part of china (14 hours) and spent 4 days there, in the cities of ben xi, shenyang, and dandong. we went to the biggest water cave in china and a famous buddhist mountain called qianshan, which was gorgeous. the highlight of the trip was definitely going to the border of north korea and trying to spot hidden nuclear caches and smuggle koreans over. seriously though, the difference between north korea and china is like night and day; the chinese side had large skyscrapers being built and the korean side had fishermen sitting on half-rusted boats. in shenyang we went to the palace where the first emperors of the qing dynasty lived, when they invaded china from manchuria.

beijing - we went back to beijing after the northeast and spent a couple days there; we went to tiannamen square, the temple of heaven, the summer palace, the great wall of china, and the forbidden city. beijing is an awesome city, it has this incredible combination of history and modern pop culture, like we drove past a random 500 year old imperial garden on our way to one of the night marketplaces. it's humongous too, both its area and its population, which is between 13 and 15 million people. i really loved it there, hopefully i can spend more time in beijing later.

xi'an - from beijing we took a train (12 hours) to xi'an, the old capital of china, which has about 8.5 million people. there we visited the city wall, built during the tang dynasty around 1300 years ago, the wild goose buddhist pavilion, where the stone monkey's monk stayed for 17 years on his way back from india, the huaqing imperial springs, and the tomb of qinshihuang, the first chinese emperor ever (ruled from 220-206 b.c.), where we saw the pits of the terra cotta soldiers, the '8th wonder of the world', which were discovered about 20 years ago.

luoyang - from xi'an we took a bus (4 hours) to luoyang, one of the 7 ancient cities of china, and went to the grotto by the yi river, which has over one hundred thousand buddhist figures carved into the cliffside, ranging from 2 centimeters to 17 meters tall. we also visited a shaolin temple and watched a kung fu demonstration by young shaolin acolytes. once again, why did my mom make me take violin lessons as a kid? from there we took a train back to jishou (15 hours) and took a bus back to good old baojing.

the sense of history around china is amazing - i'm really glad i read up on it a bit before i came here, it added so much to the tour, especially walking around the old imperial palaces. i have to say, chinese people really know their history; they can rattle off emperors and wars and important dates like nothing, even the ones who didn't graduate junior high school.

of course i ended up buying tons of crap everywhere we went. among them were some small imitation terra cotta soldiers from the tomb of qinshihuang, a long knife from the shaolin temple, a small bamboo flute from beijing, 8 dvds from xi'an (for about 85 american cents a piece), and a large chess set carved from cattle bone from a jade factory outside beijing. i totally splurged on this one but i knew i had to have it the moment i saw it; the pieces are carved into the likenesses of qinshihuang's army, with one set painted and the other left plain white. the original price label was 1880 yuan (mom and dad don't flip out), but i argued them down to 600, which is about 72 american dollars. so far i'm undefeated against kevin, duncan, and xu jun (our cook), rock on.

we met up with the rest of the foreign teachers in beijing, so now the full crew for the year is assembled. a quick run down:
me - me
kevin - 25 year old white boy from tennessee
duncan - 23 year old white boy from lake tahoe, graduated from berkeley in may
danny - 40 year old white fisherman from hawaii
diane - 27 year old black lady from all over the place, born in south carolina
tara - 22 year old white girl from baltimore, went to college in the northern part of new york state
nicole - 22 year old white girl from an island off the coast of washington state, went to university of arizona

we also met up with some of the teachers who'll be teaching in jishou. one of them is a 60 something (i'm guessing) lady from maine, who actually grew up in red bank, nj, right next to holmdel. how random is that?

finally, after much scientific examination of the empirical data, here are my final power rankings of the hotness of the girls in the cities in china that i've been to so far:

1. beijing - one of the early favorites that managed to come out on top, like maryland basketball a few years ago; very deep and fundamentally sound, can overwhelm with sheer talent when necessary.
2. xi'an - a solid and safe bet, like picking kansas to win the ncaa tourney every year.
3. jishou - the southern illinois of china; a random 'town' of only 300,000 in the middle of nowhere, the salukis are definitely china's cinderella city.
t-4. ben xi, shenyang - corporately, they're like gonzaga; manage to outperform the name recognition and rep.
6. shanghai - completely abandoning college basketball, one can note the rams-like descent from heavy favorite to completely missing the playoffs. despite all predictions from the so-called touts, shanghai was completely unimpressive. of course i was only there for a couple days, so who knows.

not applicable - shenyang, dandong, luoyang; not enough time spent in these places.

alrite, enough from here. school starts in 3 days and most of us haven't even learned which school we'll be teaching at yet (there's four schools in town which will have foreign teachers). actually i'm the only one who knows for sure; i'll be teaching at the primary school across town (i bought a bike a few days before the tour, for about 22 bucks). of course this hasn't led me to do something as ridiculous as preparing lessons and materials in advance or anything. good nite!