Archive | China RSS feed for this section
Birthday Nail Salon Trip
28 Sep
It was my mom’s birthday yesterday so we both got our nails done. The stores wanted a really high price, so we stopped at a small table on the street managed by a couple of students. I love the colors, and it only cost about $5 each! 0_0
Look Out! Transformers Walk the Earth :P
26 Sep![20140828_165241[1]](https://deceptivelyblonde.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/20140828_1652411.jpg)
Kids love this big robot that sits at the local grocery store here 🙂
School Dances to “筷子兄弟 小苹果” (My Little Red Apple)
18 Sep
“筷子兄弟-小苹果”, sound recording administered by:
Prodigee Media Sdn Bhd (Music)
SIAS International University’s Freshman Candle-Lighting Ceremony was the other night. This song is very, very popular right now at weddings, clubs, parties,etc. So the university clubs, students, and workers got together and put together a dance video to welcome in the Freshmen. So Awesome!!!!
Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!
8 SepSeptember 8th was the day the Chinese celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival, kind of their version of Thanksgiving. It’s a day where they appreciate the harvests and eat yummy mooncakes (amongst other foods) with their families, all while gazing at the moon. One of my students recommended that I drink black tea while eating the mooncake because it (enhanced the natural flavor and burns off the sugar). It did go might well together, if I say so myself 🙂
My mooncake tasted a lot like a fig newton, but if you want to celebrate your own Mid-Autumn Festival, there are many many different kinds of mooncakes to try!
First Trip to Zhengzhou
7 SepLast Thursday we took our first trip into Zhengzhou,
a large city about 1 hours drive from Xinzheng, my new hometown. Xinzheng is considered a rural farming town out here in China, but it actually boasts of about 600,000 people living here. While it has a ton of normal shopping, the prices can be a little high and the variety of items is small. Consequently, a lot of the foreigners and students prefer to go into the much larger Zhengzhou (8 Million Inhabitants ~ the size of New York City) for a greater selection of products and more opportunities for bartering prices down.
One of the things Zhengzhou offers that Xinzheng doesn’t is a far larger number or walk-in clinics, including one that works solely on Job Physicals or Physicals required by Visa Applications. So this past week we were sent into Zhengzhou to visit the clinic to have our physicals for the Permanent Residency. This was really our first major foray outside of the College Campus, since we have been so busy moving in and settling down. It didn’t help that classes were starting last Monday and we had to instantly jump into lesson planning. But all that aside, this was really our first adventure and we soaked up every minute of it. I’ll post more about the physical itself later, but here are a few things we noticed in our drive through the city:
The Traffic is INSANE!
Two lane roads that suddenly have five lanes of cars, scooter and taxis driving down the sidewalks, huge poles holding up the overpasses above suddenly appearing in the middle of a driving lane, no merging lanes, and a complete disregard for any road signs contributes to what seems like absolute chaos. It’s truly amazing that there are not more accidents than we saw. There are NO traffic laws ~ at one point we had a four way corner with cars going from each corner all at the same time, crossing three lanes of traffic in any given direction. The only exception is that you are responsible for everything in front of you. Conversely, you don’t have to look behind you at all, whoever is behind you is responsible for not hitting you. It’s pretty confusing, but they work it out. Makes for a lot of butting into lines.
Crazy Drivers ignoring the lanes
I couldn’t snap fast enough to get the hold picture, but these two lanes meet at the bottom.
It doesn’t help that they tell you how long til the light changes. All the cars just get impatient and jump the light.
Scooters and bikes take up a shocking amount of room!
Arrived at Last!
6 Sep
Sorry! I started writing this back on the 25th, but I only just finished it. 😦 Many Apologies!
Well this trip was quite the fun experience. . . ~ Murphy’s Law was working in overtime throwing things in our path! If one more thing had gotten screwed up, I’d have just screamed. I probably should have known that was how it was going to go when my first photo of the trip was of the Jack Swigert (coined “Houston, we’ve had a problem) 😛
As I mentioned before, my mother and I were part of a group of four people who weren’t going to fit on the original flights arranged for everyone else ~ they ran out of seats for us. So instead, they decided we should leave the morning after the rest of our team. Which would have been fine had Sias not wanted us to pay for the hotel up front. They agreed to re-imburse us later, but with hotels around the Denver Airport as expensive as they were, this was a lot of money that we didn’t really want to spend out-of-pocket. Who knew how long we were going to have to wait to be re-imbursed? . . . it just didn’t seem worth the risk. Continue reading
Building 63 Wax Museum
26 Jun
Had a lot of fun running through Building 63’s Wax Museum. It was the first time I had visited one of the wax houses, so I was kind of fascinated to see what they looked like. A lot of the statues were surprisingly realistic! I was also startled to find that it had a lot of artifacts attached, like signed guitars and CDs from famous musicians and bands; John Wayne’s hat; etc.
The building also offers a Horror Chamber with creepy and spooky sights! 🙂 Oh, and there is a stand that let’s you make a WAX copy of your own hand! Then you can color it after it is done! It was a really fun place to wander through, I’d definitely recommend it to parents with kids or to couples. You can take pictures with the famous people!!
Address: 63 building, 60 Yeouido-dong, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul Continue reading
“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city” ~ Roman Payne
Social Media
My Websites
Traveler’s Loadstone
Language Translation
Deceptively Blonde 