it’s called the Walt Disney company. The Disney Shanghai Resort opened just last year and is the 6th Disney resort in the world. This field class was for our International Business Management Class. We mostly looked at how a company from the US conducted operations in a country and culture that is entirely unique to that of which you would find in the States. We were left just over 6 hours to ‘conduct research’ in the park while riding rides and visiting different theme parks. Melanie is in my class and Sam’s field class was cancelled in Mauritius, so I was able to spend the day entirely with these two. My favorite ride was the Pirates of the Caribbean. It was incredible! The animations were so realistic. They had a humongous screen that made you feel as if you were in the ocean swimming with the sharks and fish. We stayed for fireworks after the park had closed and they put on a great show on the largest Disney castle in the world! What a day…
The second day in China, we left for 5 days on a field program called ‘Scenic Southern China.’ We caught an early morning, 3 hour flight from Shanghai to Guilin where we met our tour guides and went to lunch. I am slowly realizing that the Asian cultures have many different dishes with each meal. I thought that a 10 course meal in Vietnam was nice, but in China we were getting at least 10 and upwards of 15 different foods in any given meal. I can tell you with confidence that none of us went hungry during our 5 day trip. After lunch, we went to the famous Reed Flute Cave (picture below). The cave was lit up with neon lights which gives the picture that very blue tint. We stayed here for an hour or so before going to our hotel. I decided to take a quick nap then before dinner seeing as I was starting to come down with a cold. Going from 90F+ to 32F in a matter of only two days was not too easy on my body… After our dinner, we went on a night cruise along the Sha and Rong Lakes, seeing the famous twin pagodas. There were many different shows being put on along the shore for the night cruise entertainment. I was very tired at this point and decided to retire early for the night after the cruise.
The next morning, we woke up early for the main attraction on our field program. We took a bus to the Lijiang River where we spent the next 5 hours sailing through towering hills on a 100 person boat. Despite having a cold, I spent approximately 4 hours on the outside top deck because the views were too breathtaking to miss. It was a 100 mile art gallery and I didn’t want to miss a single moment. With each bend in the river, more and more beauty. I have a couple of pictures below. One of the few times that I was inside was when lunch was served. This was not one of those fancy 10 course meals, rather a boxed lunch. It was good though! I spent a lot of time talking with Stephen on the top deck who was our liaison for the trip. We had 33 students on this trip and it was tough at times to stay together in a group. Luckily we didn’t lose anyone on the trip. For the most part, we stayed together like Chinese sticky rice. Our second night of this program, we stayed in Yangshuo. We visited a school and interacted with the children after our river cruise. We played bad minton and ping pong with the roughly 10 year-old students. They kicked our butts. Afterwards, we went to dinner! We did a cooking class where we cooked all of our own food. Egg dumplings, Kung Pao chicken, and fried noodles are the items we made in that crowded and cold kitchen. We were surrounded by more mountains right outside the cooking class so at least we had that going for us. When we finished, we went outside to eat (temperature still around freezing) our food. I had a stuffy nose and I could only taste one bite of my Kung Pao chicken despite loading it with chili pepper. Other than that, I couldn’t taste any of my food but I am assuming it was amazing.
Yangshuo and the hotel we stayed in were incredible! We stayed on a popular walking street that was lit up at night from the bars, clubs, and shops that lined the streets. I wanted to go to bed early, but as soon as I stepped out to go shopping, I couldn’t stop. There were so many incredible deals and I had so much fun walking around the streets with my friends on the program. Bargaining was ridiculous in China. I was just looking at one of the shirts in the market and the lady came up to me and said ‘280 Yuan’ which was about $44. I mean it was a nice shirt, but nowhere near that price worth. I told her I would give her 100 Yuan for the shirt and she just looked at me as if I were crazy. So, I decided that I didn’t really want the shirt that bad and started to walk away. As soon as I began to walk away, she drastically kept dropping the price until she finally got down to 100 Yuan. I pulled out 80 and told her it was all I had and she accepted. Later my friend Rudy came back and bought the same shirt for 40 Yuan. This was basically all of China which I absolutely loved! I don’t know why, but I really like bargaining and interacting with the locals.
The second day, we hopped on yet another plane from Guilin to Beijing. We headed straight for the Great Wall of China. Our tour guide, Tony, was with us since day one in Guilin and we also had another local guide for Guilin and Yangshuo named Kevin. Tony knew just about everything there was to know in Beijing and we were eager to learn. We went to a section of the Great Wall that is still one of the original sections of the wall made with sticky rice. When we first arrived, there were small markets outside that we had only a minute to shop at. Rudy was looking at a communist hat to keep his head warm while we were on the wall. The lady quoted him a 390 Yuan price tag. Rudy looked at her and said, “I’ll give you 20.” Again, she looked at if as if he were out of his right mind. He started walking away and not long after, she said “Okay, okay, 20…” From $60 to $3 in a matter of seconds. Rudy was the real thing when it came to bargaining! They think we are stupid but I guess some people will still pay that high price tag. We took a chairlift up to our section of the Great Wall and it was amazing. I couldn’t believe that I was seeing the wall with my own eyes and standing on it with my own two feet. The wall was steep! We didn’t hike a whole lot up and down the wall, but enough to take some good pictures and have some fun. We even saw one of today’s most famous UFC fighters, Floyd Mayweather. When we were finished, we tobogganed down the Great Wall which was an experience of its own! We were riding fast down a metal chute for about 5 minutes. My hands were freezing!! We went to a famous Peking Duck restaurant that night which was so good. The duck was definitely one of the best meals that I have had in a long while.
Our last full day in China, we went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is the largest in the world and it was hard to wrap our head around the whole thing to really get a feel for how large it was. The Forbidden City was much more than I was expecting! This was, in a way, what I see when I think of Chinese architecture. I have one picture attached below. We didn’t visit all 9999.5 rooms, but we did get to walk through the city and at least see a large portion of the outsides. From the Forbidden City, we hopped on a rickshaw and drove past a beautiful lake and other scenery to a local family’s home. Part of our program included having a local family cook a meal for us. I was truly hoping that we would be able to interact more with the family, but it was quite limited. At least we were able to support their family through SAS. They taught us how to make egg dumplings. It was hilarious watching us Sasers trying to make the dumplings and the mother of the family just laughing at us the entire time. We had no idea what we were doing and she knew that…
We we scheduled to visit the Summer Palace, one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, however, we decided to stay somewhere a bit warmer. Instead, we all agreed to go shopping. As we walked in this ‘mall,’ it looked like any department store/ JC Penny/ standard mall you would find in the US. Four floors, employees dressed properly, you could find coats, fabrics, and other clothes hanging on racks, jewelry and watches in glass containers on glass shelves, everything was at this mall. This was a nice place! But the reason I put ‘mall’ in quotation marks, was because this was no ordinary mall. This was the Pearl Market. The main difference from your normal mall in the US; there were no price tags. Everything had to be bargained for. They bargained hard too. As soon as I walked in the building, I was forcefully dragged off to the side to look at scarves of which I had no interest. It’s hard to believe that even though everything is made in China, I couldn’t find ANYTHING in China!! Nothing that was real at least. Everything was some form of knock-off from a higher name brand company. In this particular market, our tour guide explained to us that there were mostly the ‘genuine fakes.’ The stuff was still fake, but it is a high quality of fake. So it may not necessarily be made by The North Face or Adidas, but it has nearly an identical quality.
One of the funniest things that happened to me was in the Pearl Market. I was looking at bags in one of the shops and I saw a North Face backpack that caught my eye. Curious, I asked how much it cost. She told me first that it cost 900 Yuan (roughly $136). I told her there was no way and that I would give her only 100 Yuan ($15). I ended up getting the backpack for what I asked… Then, as I kept walking through the market, I came up to another bag shop and they tried to sell me more backpacks. I told them I just bought one and showed them the one on my back. She asked how much I got that for. I told her that I just bought it for 80 Yuan (just in case she had something similar to offer me for that same price). Unexpectedly, she said, “I’ll buy that backpack from you for 100 Yuan.” I told her “120 and it’s yours.” She agreed and within one minute minute of buying the backpack around the corner, I found myself selling it to the vendors in the next store over for a 20 Yuan ($3) profit. I handed her the backpack and she told me that she would pay me online. I told her that I would only do it for cash and she didn’t want to do that deal. I knew that I wouldn’t ever get paid online and it wasn’t worth it. Long story short, I did get to end up keeping the backpack and I absolutely love it. Had I been able to sell the backpack, I would have just gone straight back and asked for another one anyway.
Our final destination was the Temple of Heaven on our very last day before our flight. It was cold out this morning and this is when the sticky rice in our group began to fall apart. We kept losing people left and right. There were 4 other SAS programs all staying at the same Holiday Inn in Beijing so it was easy for us to get distracted. We did end up getting all 33 people on our flight back to the ship in Shanghai thankfully. That night, while we were still docked in Shanghai, I took night photos of the gorgeous skyline and the 24 million people living in the giant city. Overall, China has been most certainly one of my favorite ports and I cannot wait until I come back to visit. Our tour guides were both spectacular and we all sincerely had the time of our lives. Here are five fotos from China.
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