Xi'an Travels

Last week one of my amazing teachers had to leave so we took her to Beijing's biggest pizza. It was delicious and the size is not an exaggeration! 

Beijing duck pizza! Beijing duck, onions, duck sauce, and cheese, amazing :) 

Elaine and my 2 amazing teachers! 

After this we took a 12 hour sleeper train from Beijing to the historic city of Xi'an. It was actually pretty comfortable. 

Roomies! 

Once into Xi'an we visited about 2 museums a day (all of which I LOVED), me and Chinese history museums all day was like being on a cloud :D 

And of course we got to see the famous Terra Cotta Warriors from the tomb of the Qin dynasty emperor, the first to unify China. 

Notice the little ant people off to the side. 

The last event was a trip to the city's wall, which we got to ride bikes on and was probably my favorite part of the trip! 

Hopefully I will have more exciting things to share soon! 

罗玫瑰

The Small Things Make it Better

Sorry again for the long delay in posting but I'm definitely not having as many of the big picture taking adventures as I was before. Now I have whatever type of normalcy you can have in Beijing more or less setup and it's the little things that having been making my time here recently so amazing! So from now on I'll probably post once a week. Every Tuesday and Thursday I have been meeting with a language partner, she's pretty awesome :) Her name's Eva and we meet for coffee in the hutongs (small traditional Chinese homes that are still homes or businesses) across from the Lama temple. 

This is the street. 

This is my chrysanthemum and jasmine tea (it's ok to drink the flowers)!

I also went to an art talk in the 798 art district. I just love it there.  :) 

The talk was about an artist, Tehching Hsieh, who is very little studied and almost never talked about in the West. He currently had an exhibition up in the museum and a curator discussed his works. It would take forever to try to talk about his work but he has been an amazing contribution to both the eastern and international art community and I hope to continue to see more of him in the future.

This plus an art gallery event, dinner with strangers, and a few other cool things that I have no photos of made it a pretty awesome week :) I'll be trying to take more photos next week! haha 

Great Things make Greater Memories

Sorry it has taken me so long to post this. Now that classes are picking up I am doing fewer and fewer tourist trips and more studying. One class I loved taking was my first calligraphy class... I was horrible but practice make perfect!! 

Look at how good I was by the end of class!! 

 Just kidding! It was my teacher! This is my Chinese name which is 罗玫瑰 Luo Meigui (Low May Gway). The word for actual Romans is 罗马人 (Low Ma Ren) and Meigui 玫瑰 means Rose which is my English middle name. The name feels very me :) 

Then was the Great Wall of China, it was absolutely amazing! The trip up through a bit of the countryside was beautiful. 

Then I took a cable car up :) 

Then this was the first view I had of the great wall. My heart definitely skipped a beat. 

Once I got to the end of the reconstructed part of the wall I just kept going. Knowing I was walking on the original wall with over 600 year of history was all too amazing. I definitely would love to visit it again. 

The way that nature had become a part of the wall was probably the most beautiful part. It truly seemed like a Ming masterpiece. 

These are my feet, I literally walked on the wall's wall. 

Also the ride down was nothing casual. It was a toboggan which was pretty fast and probably likewise unsafe but SO much fun!!! 

谢谢！ 再见！