Hong Kong Day 3

Dim Sum with my Class

It has become the norm to get lunch with my class which has been a lot of fun and a lot easier to get to know them when I am not standing up in front of the class. On Friday we went to dim sum. It was delicious. I just let them all order food and it was a good decision. They ordered great dishes (maybe a little bit too much but luckily it is mostly guys so they had no problem finishing the food). Some I had heard of before and some were brand knew.

 Mong Kong for dinner with the group

 

On the way to Mong Kong we realized we had totally circled around this guy and since then we tend to that a lot on the MTR. We just want to talk to each other so badly. The  next picture is of us at Mong Kong. So many people and so many lights that you forgot it was night time!

Trying octopus balls that we bought on the street before finding somewhere for dinner.

 

Then we found a restaurant that was cheap and had great food. After we all finished our food we decided to eat some of Liz's vegetables because she had so much.

Hong Kong Day 2

So our first day of teaching it poured rain...and none of us had umbrellas...some of us (two) had rain coats but those did not seem to make a difference..they still got wet. We all showed up to our first day of class drenched and all the students were dry. It took us all day to dry off and then it started pouring rain again as soon as we were done teaching. we quickly bought umbrellas at the local 7eleven before making our trek back to our rooms (now we travel everywhere with umbrellas)

After our first day we decided we wanted some good food so we went to a local neighborhood and found some delicious dumplings in a local restaurant.

Hong Kong-Day 1

IVCT-the campus I am teaching at in Hong Kong. Went there our first afternoon to meet with the organizers and actually understand the schedule for the week.

The port right next to the school. So cool to look at and study after spending part of a semester trying to understand the loading and unloading process of a port so that i could model it (now i understand how massive everything is (in particular the crains))

Shenzhen-Day2

Another view of shenzhen from another park that we climbed to the highest point of

 

Pink apartment buildings! (i think i found where i am going to live...well maybe they would need to be a brighter pink to actually get me to commute to boston from them)

 

having fun at the pond we found in the park that was filled with lily-pads

Then we went to a museum in the afternoon to learn about the history of shenzhen and discovered that at least the museum was all about recreating different scenes with plaster so we did as the chinese did...we took pictures with these reenacted scenes.

And then, when there are artifacts that they found...well it obviously is difficult to find all the pieces. it just surprised me that they even included this piece in the exhibit when so much of it is plaster.

 

For this subway system you use a token that gets reused once you are done with your ride. This is a picture in the subway....isn't china supposed to be crowded or something (?)...anyway the subway cars go on forever there are no doors dividing the different cars.

Ready to go to Hong Kong with all my stuff!

Shenzhen-Day 1

Shenzhen-the 'special economic zone' of China...aka where they tried out capitalism-ish before allowing the whole country to do it

Sleeping on the plane ride to shenzhen with our awesome pillows

acting like we are climbing the world in a park we found after dropping our stuff off at the hostel we were going to stay at.

We are off to find ....whatever is behind these bushes.

 

We had way too much fun imitating sculptures in this park.

beautiful view of shenzhen that we walked/climbed too.

The pagoda is where we got our views of shenzhen from.

Dinner Day 5 in Beijing

This night we met up with another aunt and uncle of emily's and they brought us to a place to get delicious chinese food (that also had really good dumplings...so we could get traditional chinese dishes)

The restaurant from the outside.

Emily and her aunt looking at the menu (it was so nice to just let them pick what we should eat). The group in our private room.

 

After dinner, we went to another aunt's house so emily could say good-bye to her nephew (cute little boy in the picture).

798 Park/District

(aka the art district...lots of little studios and museums down this street..something and fun to see in Beijing)

as we were walking from the bus stop to the entrance to the neighborhood...we noticed that the wires for the telephone pole were very low...this made us very nervous.

A car made from stone (all of it..even the inside..or at least from what we could see)

Forbidden City

The forbidden city had incredible details on the buildings to look at and a really interesting set up for their garden. Lots of rocks and different flowers.

 

This gargoyle/statue is awesome. I am so glad danielle pointed it out.

I loved just looking at these roofs. Danielle whited captured how amazing it looked so well  in this photo.

While waiting to meet up with Anne Shen, we were chilling and I whipped out my Kindle so I could learn more about the Forbidden city and the old guy was totally fascinated by it.

So after walking down the main aisle, we decided to walk down the side streets of the forbidden city and found this structure and a little girl doing this pose infront of it so we decided we just had to it although she looked way cuter we had too much fun with it. We tried having a new rule that we could not just smile at the camera we had to be doing something else (a lot harder to do then it sounds when you are taking so many photos)

 

After walking through the forbidden city we went to a park across the street and went to the highest point in order to get a better sense for just how big the forbidden city is and the golden roofs of the forbidden city are amazing to look at. It is such a big space!