我终于有照片！

Guys this is so great! The internet is letting me put up pictures again. I heard the internet is always patchy here in October...why that is whoooooo knows. These pictures are in backwards order, so if you want to match them with earlier posts about my adventures in these various places, think reverse chronological order. The first two pictures are from our trip to Xi'an.

What is this building? It is the not-so-secret headquarters of an evil alien empire who is planning to take over the earth by brainwashing the Chinese and then using them as it's earth-destroying tools. Okay actually it is outside of a beautiful Buddhist temple, and one teacher told us that the relics that are currently in the temple will eventually go in this building, and it is supposed to be two praying hands. Seriously though...I don't know. It is huge.


These are the world-famous terracotta warriors. You should look at the picture in close up because they have different faces. I really liked the building they were in. It was built over them, it is massive and it has a huge arched ceiling. This is the kind of tourist place you have to go to, but then you are afraid it won't be that good because you've already seen lots of pictures, but then you are blown away by the hugeness of it and the history of it. It really gets your imagination going to think about what sort of person would want this stuff with him when he dies and what sort of society you'd have to have to actually achieve it. What the heck? was a question I asked a lot in Xi'an.


This is me doing a cartwheel on the beach in Qingdao. Please don't look at this one up close, I'm sure it's awful, I haven't even looked at it up close. But I loved Qingdao. This cartwheel is a cartwheel of pure joy.


This is from our trip to the "countryside" outside of Beijing. It was pretty awesome, because we got to see all of these old pagodas, and climb a mountain that was not too intense, and sleep in hotel add-ons to people's houses. I forgot what I wrote about the countryside before, so we can all go look at it when we are done writing/reading this.

This is the now world-famous 鸟巢，Niaochao，Bird's Nest. During the Paralympics (a while ago), I went with some friends to see 7-on-7 soccer. It was a lot of fun and I got to see Olympic Park. If you look really closely they still have the flame going up on top. Sorry about the fence, but we didn't go any closer.

Well all of this pictures are from a long time ago, so a quick update on how I am now: just fine. Getting weirded out that there are only three weeks of this semester left. Most of my friends here are leaving, so I have to start over with that in January. The trip to Huangshan Mountain was less than ideal--it rained the whole time and I got sick. But I did talk to an old guy in a store about his cat for twenty minutes. So it was worth it.

Enjoy, and now that pictures are working I should be able to share more more often, working my way up to the present.

P.S. Title of the post is "I finally have pictures!"