China -- The land of communists and tour guides

China: A brief travelogue.

So the Academy decided to send me to China to have a culture/language immersion experience. Outsiders would say "but don't you already speak chinese?" but people "in the know" would argue, "hey shut up outsiders, and stop interrupting curtis' blog-flow, its

somewhat fragile" then they might continue, "Uncle Sam is forking over a few grand for you to go vacation arou

nd china? and they're giving you more than an ample amount of spending money so you're sure to have a good time? Legit man, pretty legit" Legit indeed. The 4-week adventure was based out of NanJing at NanJing University, and we spent each weekend or so at a hot vacation spot in China.

Weekend 1: Shanghai

Kyle and I made our first chinese friend at this store -- she said she hated Americans haha. She was kinda joking, but you can never be sure... Overall grade: B+ the shop owners were polite, the food was alright, and we only got "shanghai'd" once. (if you want that story you'll have to upgrade to purtishansel.blogspot/DELUXEPACKAGE which includes live-stream of conscious-streaming)

Weekend 2: XiAn

Mostly just terra cotta stuff, so unless you're doing a dissertation on the concept of eternal life in ancient china (Mr. Boyd shout-out) XiAn wasn't really anything special. B-

Weekend 3: Guilin and Yangshuo

My kind of town -- beautiful beautiful beautiful.

Epic bike ride in YangShuo -- led us up to this little epic-ly scenic lake. Wonderful.

Weekend 4: Beijing

"The Great Wall" standing on one of China's most famous wall's the great wall. I love you kyle.

Me looking forlorn in the Forbidden City. "Not as forbidden as the name makes it sound", said all the tourists there that day... something to think about.

Grade: I kinda hate Beijing. It was probably because the street vendors there were more pushy than a... really pushy type of thing/person. I'm talking grab onto your arm and pull you into their stores by force. I'm talking price gouging unheard of this side of the mississippi. I'm talking telling you that your chinese sucks and that you're a piece of laji if you walk out of their store. The bad taste in my mouth was probably also a combination of leaving Nanjing, where i left a piece of my heart, and the very early stages of the cold i have now. D+