China

Family and Friends,
I just got done with my six-day visit to China, and now two days later I am in Japan starting my travels here. This is a picture from my photo shoot on the Great Wall, Mo wanted me to be like the America's Next Top Model girls so I did it for her. The thing is, I liked it! I am actually never going to come home and I will continue to travel the world modeling for whoever will pay me. Yeah!! The ship initially docked in Hong Kong, and I was there for only a day. I spent the day walking around the city and taking the ferry between downtown and where the ship was docked. I was amazed at the Hong Kong skyline, it’s the most amazing one I have ever seen. They day I was there it was very foggy though so I couldn’t get any good pictures to bring home. It is an amazingly metropolitan city, all of the shopping malls are full of high-priced designer stores and there are Mercedes and Rolls Royce’s everywhere. I expected it to some degree, but the city’s size and modernity was very impressive.
The next morning I took off for Beijing on a Semester at Sea sponsored trip with a bunch of my good friends. The flight was long, and we didn’t do much when we got there, so we decided we needed to do something fun on our first night there. We decided on KTV, or karaoke as we call it in the states. There were nine of us and we rented our own private room for the night. I started off the night with my own rendition of N’SYNC’s “A Little More Time On You”. The rest of the night followed suit with such classics as “Afternoon Delight”, “Puff the Magic Dragon”, and Mike McQueeny’s unforgettable take on “Lady in Red”. I recorded some of us singing so I could bring the tapes home and try to get some of us signed on a record label. In all honesty, the singing was pretty terrible but it was one of the most fun nights that I have had on the trip.
The second morning I spent at Tian an Men Square. It was by far the most crowded tourist spot I have been to on the trip. The amazing part about it is that the square is huge, but still it was packed like the mall during Christmas shopping season. Obviously the story behind the place is important and very intriguing, but there is nothing like masses of people to take away from the ambiance of a historical monument. After that I visited the Forbidden City where the emperor used to live. It was a lot like a museum, you could look at a lot of things, but most of it was behind glass so it didn’t feel quite authentic.
I considered everything before the third day a precursor to the thing I was most excited about seeing in China, the Great Wall. I really had no expectations going in to my Great Wall visit, all that I had heard from some other people was that it was quite a hike to actually get to the wall. I spent about three hours in total on the wall, thankfully the rumors weren’t true and it only took 15 minutes of stair climbing to get there. The weather wasn’t exactly beautiful, a very foggy and chilly grey morning, but I think the fog added a little mystique to the experience. It’s my story and I am sticking to it. Along with a few other sights I have been fortunate enough to see on this trip, the wall is something you have to see with your own eyes. It has a certain indefinable quality that needs to be experienced firsthand. It seems to stretch on forever, and when I was done the guide told me that to travel the entire wall at a good pace it would take three months.
As far as being in Beijing during the current turmoil between China and Tibet, it didn’t affect my stay at all. I never saw any protests or anything that seemed out of the ordinary. I will be interested to see how China is perceived as an Olympic host country. The language barrier is the most difficult I have experienced so far during my trip and even cab drivers and hotel employees aren’t sure of the English names of certain places. I drove past the Olympic complex, and the building for the opening and closing ceremonies was very cool looking. It looks like something from outer space, a bird’s nest made of a spider web. They were still doing construction so I couldn’t get very close to the building, but it is all very centralized in the heart of Beijing.
The fourth day was spent mostly in transit between Beijing and Shanghai. Shanghai is more of the financial center of China. I would compare it to New York and Beijing to Washington D.C. It is a huge city, and considering I only had one day to spend there, I saw about one neighborhood. It was also pouring rain the day that I was there so it wasn’t the best day to be out and about seeing the sights.
This entry was definitely a little on the short side, considering how much time I spent in China, but it is due to the fact that I have only had two days between countries so the time I spend on the ship is mostly catch up on sleep time. There is less than a month left on my voyage, and the majority of the countries are behind me. Hopefully Japan will live up to my lofty expectations and then I will be off to cross the Pacific. I hope everyone at home is well and I hope to talk to you all soon.

Conor