A Climb to the Top

While we were in Hangzhou, we went to the Six Harmonies Pagoda as Colin wrote about. The climb was a total of 13 stories but you could only walk out to the deck on the odd numbered stories. Some raced to the top while I took my time and stopped on each floor that I could. I found this pavilion and thought it would be cool to take a picture of the pavilion on each floor. I thought that it would give some perspective to just how massive this pagoda was. It took me a while to do this because I had a hard time trying to find the pavilion each time as it shrunk on each floor. Sometimes I had to walk around each floor two or three times to find. The view from the top was spectacular and worth every step. Here is the result.

Mahjong

One night in Suzhou, our bus driver went to go meet his friends to play mahjong. Chengyan told us more about the game and we found out that Chinese mahjong is nothing like the American style solitaire mahjong. Renee suggested that Chengyan teach us how to play mahjong. Well, we looked for a mahjong set and I had the fortune of finding a mahjong set that Chengyan got me for a very good price- about $11. Although it was a good price, the joke was on me because the mahjong set is very heavy and I of course insisted on carrying it on the plane with me back home but that is another story. Anyways, we never got to play mahjong but I did learn the rules and the necessary Chinese characters for the game. The game is composed of four main sets of tiles. The first set is composed of north, south, east, and west Chinese character tiles. The second is fa, middle, and the door. The third is pies and the forth sticks. This game is kind of like rummy and is played with four people. To start the game, A north, south, east, and west tiles are found and each person takes one of these tiles. The person with the east tile starts. All the tiles are laid out in rows two deep and 17 long. The person with the east tile rolls the dice and whatever number they get is where they start drawing tiles for the game. The next person draws and it continues until each person has 13 tiles. After this, the game starts. The goal of the game is to get four sets of three and a pair. The sets are composed of either all of the same tile or a run. A person may either draw a tile or "eat" a tile. A person may "eat" a tile if they wish to have the tile that the previous person discarded and this is played when going for a run. A person may also "hit" any players tile if going for a "set". With both of these, the complete set must be shown to all players. The first person that gets the four sets and the pair wins. This game is also a gambling game but Chengyan told me several times not to gamble! Maybe we will "gamble" with peanuts or cookies! It was really fun to learn how to play mahjong and it was also interesting to see the real mahjong instead of the online solitaire mahjong.

Botanical Garden

One of my favorite horticulture visits was to the Shanghai Botanical Garden.   That is mostly because I love flowers.  Throughout the garden, I saw many flowers that I had never seen before and also flowers that I recognized.  Although it was hot, it was fun to roam around the garden.  


We saw the "Peace and Harmony" garden that had a water lily and a crab type topiary.  The words for peace and harmony in Chinese are close to those for water lily and crab.  It was interesting to see all the different topiaries and to learn what they meant as well.  I wish that we had more time in the garden.  It was a peaceful walk and a nice refuge from the hustle and bustle of the city.  

I agree with Melissa

I would definately have to agree with Melissa's post on "Knowing A Little Chinese can go a Long Way". Learning Chinese was one of the favorite times of the trip for me, between learning it in class and everyone was so afraid to try, to then learning it on the bus where we were so into it, and finally trying it out wherever we went. However, the thing that I found to be most peculiar would be, even though they would smile or even clap for us as Melissa said, that the majority of the time they never responded in Chinese but in English instead. So not only were we enjoying our new cultural immersion, but the local people were excited that they could use that chance to use their English as well. I can not even count how many times we were on one of our tours and people saw our huge group and yelled "Hello" to us and laughed and kept trying to talk to us in English, it was really fun for us, almost as if we were celebrities...they especially enjoyed taking pictures of us...or at least Hannah...whenever they could.

Opps... It is not 6...

On our first morning in China, my roommate Hannah and I woke up before our wake up call.  We had left part of the curtains open.  we proceeded to get up and get ready.  The kicker here is that neither of us had the correct time and there was no clock in the room.  At the front desk in the hotel, there are clocks from all over the world.  Hannah ran down there to find out what time it was and it was only 5:30 AM!  We had already been up for quite awhile.  We figured that we got up between 3:30 and 4 AM.  So we patiently waited for our wake up call to come at 6:30 so that we could go down to breakfast.  We were one of the first at breakfast and we hung out.  We later asked Chengyan and we found out that all of China is under one time zone to make doing business easier.  Because we are out east it meant that the sun came up super early!  Here is just one of the main cultural differences that I noticed in China.  With all of our time zones in the United States, the sun rises at a normal time every morning.  So if ever going to China, remember to close your curtains, have the correct time, and not worry if you look outside at 4 in the morning and the sun is shining brightly!

Knowing a Little Chinese Can Go A Long Way

Throughout the semester, one of our professors Chengyan Yue, taught us some basic Chinese.  We learned hello, goodbye, thank you, your welcome, and bathroom.  Once we got to China, we tried to use the words that we learned right away.  At customs, I said thank you and goodbye in Chinese and the guard smiled at me.  That was the case everywhere we went.  Anytime that we tried to use Chinese, they would smile, laugh, or even clap!  As the trip continued, we would bombard Chengyan with how do we say this in Chinese or that.  By the end of the trip, we learned how to count, say how much is it, and even leave me alone!  Although I could not always say it exactly and received by a blank look, I would try again.  When the other person would finally understand what I was trying to say, it was a break through and we would both laugh.  By knowing even a few words in Chinese, we were able to connect with the people encountered and it was one of my favorite day to day experiences.