Panda-monium Part I

China was panda-monium! We spent eight days traveling to Beijing, Xi'An, and Shanghai and we got to spend a lot of that time with my sister Kate who was our personal guide, translator, navigator, party planner and chief negotiator. Thanks, Meimei!

We had insane amounts of fun and eight days went by in a flash, a contrast to our nine day Japan trip in January which felt like months. China is a crowded and smoggy place but it's endlessly fascinating. The history is hard to wrap my mind around but I couldn't hear enough about how things are done in today's China.

So here's China Blog Part 1: The Big Stuff.

Tiennamen Square/The Forbidden City (Beijing)

Luckily I did my research before checking out these quintessential Beijing sights. We had a guide who gave us the China-approved story of the student protests so her viewpoint was rather different from the democracy-lovers version that we hear in the U.S. Tiennamen Square is huge but boring except for the soldiers marching around. Next to it is the gigantic People's Hall where their "Parliament" meets and can accommodate 10,000 members in one meeting hall. The Forbidden City was pretty neat too. Here's Andrew and me trying to look serious:

The 2008 Olympics Sites (Beijing)

Andrew goes ga-ga over the Olympics. If we couldn't get into the Water Cube because of construction, he was determined to run 400m on the track inside the Bird's Nest. Sadly no security guards would let us, but it was cool to watch the Olympics montage video on the big screen and wonder about how intense the security must have been for the opening ceremony. There was a large group of students there who were excited to see us foreigners, so they chased us around the stadium like paparazzi.

The Great Wall- maybe you've heard of it? (Outside Beijing)

What can you say? We climbed the Great Wall. Surreal. Steep, slippery, uneven, old.... Here's Andrew looking like Genghis Khan. We took beers up to the top and made a toast to this World Wonder.

The Terracotta Warriors (Xi'An)

We took a night train to Xi'An, southwest of Beijing, to see the Terracotta Warriors. Those dudes are crazy! The museum and exhibitions were very well done.... almost too well done to the point of feeling like the whole thing was a scam. An emperor in 200BC wanted to massacre and be buried with his army because he believed he would command them in the afterlife, but luckily he instead agreed to build models of the soldiers. Each face is unique and there are over 8,000 soldiers (archers, infantrymen, generals, etc.) and horses and chariots too. Some areas were still being excavated since they were just discovered in 1974 by a farmer drilling a well.