instead of doing homework like the good student I should be, here are some pictures. hoorah.

the people who stayed up to see the sun rise while freezing up on tai shan

dj and a little girl at the antique market...probably one of the cutest pictures taken the entire month.

the group at Tian'anmen Square. Some guy kept pointing his video camera at us and standing there blatantly taping us. It was disconcerting. Behind those smiles are grimaces of...uncomfortableness as the guy kept recording us. Then, when asked to go away, he walked away a few paces so he was a bit behind us and started taping again.

a stone thing holding up a tree in the Confucius Temple

Forbidden City

Along a walkway in the house of a famous female poet who lived in Jinan

Emperor's Dinner we had in Beijing

A throne room of some high ranking official in the Forbidden City. In Tai He Palace, which was under renovation, there are nine rows of nine pillars with red ones directly surrounding teh throne, dragons all over the ceiling, and the throne of the Emperor was directly under a huge ball or something, and it was said that the dragons would make it fall on the throne if someone besides the Emperor sat on the throne. When the last dynasty was overthrown, the military general who took over at first ordered the throne moved back before he would dare sit on it.

more of the Forbidden City

etc

the shiny walkway was just for the Emperor

that's probably a really gross picture of me in the Forbidden City, but it's small enough that I can't tell at the moment.

The lions...everyone from merchants to the Emperor could decorate the front of their houses with the lions to guard. The curls in the mane signified your place in society. The Emperor could have nine, seven for the really rich people, and five for the people rich enough to have them but not really all that rich. The male has a ball under his paw and the female a cub.

Tian'anmen Square (The Gates of Heavenly Peace) and the outside of the Forbidden City and the portrait of Chairman Mao

A carving on the walls surrounding the Big Goose Pagoda....I think I posted this already, but it's here now.

a table. I really wanted to get one. But I couldn't send it home and they cost like, the equivalent of $10,000 in RMB. >_>

the Big Goose Pagoda, the last major attraction we went to see...still functioning as a Buddhist Temple and holds the first translations of the Buddhist texts into Chinese...which are pretty damn old...

oh look. me on a mountain, freezing my ass off.

loolooloo

boredom. must write paper. must complete accounting project. must work on accounting reading and nonfiction reading and fiction reading...critiques.....aaaaaiiiiiiiii the schoolwork. I should have gotten so much more done over the break, but I was too distracted with tv and starving since my parents make dinner at midnight and don't keep any other food in the house. must work. I need this semester to end. I STAB MY HEAD!!!!!!

yay, pictures

stairs in the drum tower, and DP and Phil, who always loved running up stairs in no time at all

One of the sons of the dragon

Da Ming lake

Really fancy waitresses at a fancy place - ancient style, Emperor's Dinner

On the mountain, above the clouds

Locations of the incident of 19....21? Can't remember right now.

The animals are nails in the Forbidden City

Tea ceremony

Garden in the Forbidden City

Altar at the Temple of Heaven

Xi'an, terracotta warriors...surrounding area....rather clean shot of the sky, actually

drum tower, drums every half hour

more than five!

Tai Mountain

Really picturesque shot I somehow got while on campus
Our little "graduation" ceremony from Beida...that's the head of the Philosophy department
Holes are where Buddhas from the grottos were stolen and taken to the States
I probably posted this one, damn it. Oh well. The Divine Path.

At the Temple of Heaven. The walls were built really low so that it seemed like everything and everyone else was taller and closer to heaven. The walkway leading up to the temple itself is flat, but on either side, the ground slopes down, so it feels like you're going uphill and ascending toward heaven...it's all pretty nifty. Then, at the Temple of Harvest, there's an echo wall...you stand at the east or west point and say something toward the wall, and a person on the opposite side will hear you. I didn't get to try that out; all the other tourists were busy yelling at random points on the wall.

I remember the old computer we called Poke-y...slow thing. Completely random and unrelated, I know, but I was trying to think up a title

At Prince Gong's mansion
Yungang Grottos
Pavilion at Prince Gong's mansion...a drinking game was played using the floor of this pavilion, and looking at the lines in three different directions, it makes three different chinese characters. There's longevity, water, and something else...I think it's flowing.
Trashcan.
In a Buddhist Temple...these are the Bodhidharma (two of them) if I'm remembering correctly.

once again, next ones didn't load...grrr

A natural rock sculpture thing in the gardens of the Forbidden City.
Beijing 2008 by Tian'anmen Square
Ride up Tai Mountain

Yungang Grottos, over 51000 figures of Buddha Sakymuni...all those tiny crevaces are Buddhas

next five didn't load again

One of the pictures I took from the little ski cart that took those of us who didn't climb the mountain up to the top except for the last half hour worth of climbing.
The tomb of Confucius. The last symbol is the symbol for wang, which means "king." There is one more horizontal line along the bottom. When an Emperor went to pay respect to Confucius' tomb, though, he refused to bow because he was king, so the wall was raised so that no one could see that it actually said "king" at the bottom.
Ride up Tai Mountain
Did I post this already? Can't remember. Anyway, me and warriors
Sunrise on the mountain...usually the sky turns blood red or something, but there were too many clouds. We did get sunrise, though, last group didn't see it at all.

random pam pictures 2

okay, worked this time. the walls of xi'an
A warrior and a few horses. Or, according to the bookmarks I got, a warrior and hoses
train ride back to beijing...damn DJ's skinny...O_o (left to right, Taylor, Phil, DJ, Brandon)
Outside the Tsingtao beer factory Lao Shi decided it would be fun for us to see.
Some more of the walls of xi'an....I was too busy riding a bike to take pictures...if I had stopped, I doubt that I could have kept going.
Good shot of the warriors
WU MEI MART!!! This is where we did all our shopping on campus...food, water, clothes, pictures, bakery, ice cream, cds, purses for cheap purse shoppers like DJ, bootleg dvds...all found at the wu-mei mart. There was an entrance (and many entrances were covered in plastic hanging things that were truly disgusting), then stairs down, and there you had a large store. There was even an olympic store down there.

random pam pictures 1

Stupid thing....I can't get another five to load this time. Oh well. The beach.....see the air? Yeah. Yeah, you do. It's gross like that. Lindsey lives on the beach, and was excited when we got to see one. She wanted to run on the beach. Didn't happen. But some random person came up to speak to me in English, DJ, Zac, and Danielle tried flying kites, and we all avoided the tour guide, James Bond, like one would avoid the plague.
One of the many random fake flower constructs we saw while in Jinan
One of the boats at the Summer Palace. I tried to get a picture, but never caught it in time.
Outside Mao ZeDong's tomb in Tian'anmen square...they wanted us to go inside, but the line was like, three freakin' miles long.
We all loved this sign. We yelled "Safty First!" at each other sometimes. This sign is found at the Hanging Temple

pam's great wall pictures

Okay, so the first ten loaded, but when I went back to do the last two, they didn't show up. So they get their own post or something. Anyway. Got Pam's pictures today, and decided to start posting those since my computer is weird and I don't want to attempt putting the pictures on this computer....it would, quite probably, kill it. And it's like, gig of space that remains. Anyway, so yeah, decided to start with great wall since my camera battery died there and I didn't get many pictures.

Purty
Look at the glorious hazy air
umm...near the bottom, by the river. but still at the great wall, though it might not look like it
That's Pam. And you can see the parking lot.
Stairs. Lots and lots of stairs.
whimper.
eek....it was so hard. O_o
Pam's friend wanted her to take a pic where she was pushing over the great wall...and that's her attempt at it...
And then she tried to make me do it, too. so, tired and sweaty and miserable though I was, I tried it. But I think, seeing the picture now, that I just succeeded in looking tired and sweaty and miserable. ....Damn, that is a really gross picture of me.
Pam and some mountains. The Great Wall was awesome, but it would have been better if the air had been clean.