China Part... Last Part! =D

Hellooo... *echoes* where did everybody go? I have been a little busy with school so haven't gotten a chance to blog.. ok well more lazy than busy. But I finally forced myself to finish blogging about my semi-adventures in China, should finish what you started right? You guys, post something so I know you're still alive yeah? =D


This was in the same park as the picture of the statues playing chess from my last post. The poor horse.. it looks so tired. =(


Same park, people can ride a helicopter that takes off and lands in the lake. I didn't go on it but it did look kind of fun.


Went to this place afterwards or another day, the days are just starting to blend together now! =P Anyways this is an amusement park, lots of pretty flowers and they have some roller coaster type rides but not a lot. It's still pretty big though, we sat on these little carts that drove us around the park. Yeah we're a lazy bunch hehe.


Hehe, I saw another amusing English sentence on the sign in front of the park. It says "...when you march into the amusement park, you seem to enter "DisneyLand" and you can enjoy the IRRITATION and happiness to the utmost!" I really shouldn't poke fun of them because they're trying their best and I make plenty of ridiculous errors in Chinese, but a little comic relief now and then is good.


Singaporean Garden, very nice Sphinx fountain. =)


Ferris wheel and random rides


I was all the way across the lake when I saw and took this picture so I didn't see the details of how this thing worked. But people probably just try to walk/cling cross without falling into the water. I just realized that I didn't get to try any of these games here, how sad.. =P


Haha this was pretty entertaining to watch. It's better if you click the picture, you can see it more clearly. It's basically a water gun fight with umbrellas on a boat. =P Doesn't that seem fun?? The poor boat in the front left don't even have any shields, heh.


Now it's time to go home.. we left from the Beijing airport and these people were very enthusiastic about us leaving. JK, we were the first flight for something, I'm not quite sure. Maybe J, you can read what that says on the banner.


And to end, here is a picture of a nice lump of pollution in Beijing. =P

I don't think I'll be going anywhere for a while so I'll just have to make my life interesting at home. Wo xiang ni men! ^^

China Part 3!

Hello friends! I have more pictures to show. =) Are you guys wondering how many more posts you have to see of China? =P Don't worry, after this one, there should only be one more part. After that, I have no more stories to tell because nothing too interesting is going on with my life.. haha as I wrote that last sentence, a huge spider just appeared on the wall in front of me. Yeah, normally in the apartment, I help you guys kill the spiders but this one was really big and its limbs were really thick.. good thing my brother is here, hehe.


As we were walking along the beach, we saw people modeling clothes! They're wearing matching clothes, aren't they cute?


And then we saw people shooting a scene. That lady wearing red and reading the script is a mainland actress I think. I don't know who she is though. Also, we found out that they were shooting a scene for a movie/drama called "Wrong Love".. or something similar, I might be translating it wrong.


Here was the whole scene. I was afraid they would yell at me so I didn't take that many pictures. =P But basically the scene was supposed to be the car with the flower on top driving by and then another actress walking past on the street holding a baby. The car would stop and then a man comes out and the lady holding the baby turns around. The lady in red was inside the car with the male actor. I think they were supposed to be on their way to getting married. You can't really see her in this picture but the lady holding the baby is behind the girl wearing blue. It was funny because the first shot they did, the poor baby was crying hysterically and kept yelling mommy. They had to reshoot the scene but the baby was still crying.. or maybe that was part of the scene...


Sunset and light rays =)


Tsingtao Beer haha


Qingdao Beer Street. We had dinner on this street and yeah people really go crazy with the drinking. The table next to us got really drunk, good thing no one threw up.. or at least not when we were eating.


We climbed up Mt. Taishan or we actually we rode a gondola lift up to the top but there was still a lot of uphill climbs, like these stairs. Jan steps are nothing compared to these right? =P


Top of the mountain


On top there were stores and restaurants that are complete tourist traps. We fell for it though. =/


5-star hotel in Shandong, China. This place was awesome, free fruit delivered to your room and free computer and internet access in the room! Funny though, on their keycard holder, they spelled hotel wrong. =P


Outside view from hotel room


Night life, it doesn't look like it in this picture but there were a lot of people here. On the bottom is the entrance to the mall and a McDonald's is right next to it.


mMm yummy desserts =) If I remember correctly, that's mochi and some taro thing.


This was at a park. The sculptures are playing chess with one another. =)

That's all for now! Read my captions that I spent so long writing, don't just look at the pictures! =P J/K my pictures aren't that interesting so maybe the story behind them will make it better.
Have a good week! ^^

XiaoYe and Perseids Meteor Shower

So after I came home from swimming at around 8:30ish, a high school friend and I were planning on going out for dinner..except my mom had already made dinner for me so we scrapped the dinner and decided to go Meteor Shower watching. The meteors were going to appear to be shooting from the constellation Perseus. I was craving food still at 10pm so my dad decided he would take us out to eat Xiao1ye4 or basically eating at night or nate-light snack. We know this Chinese restaurant in a court of Chinese restaurants in Milpitas that open late till about 2-3am. Last summer my family used to always go to this one called China Palace Restaurant.






They always give out complimentary Boba. I think that's why I like that place, but the food is really good too, though very oily...it's Chinese food, it's going to be oily.

After getting some grub, we were off to find a place to watch the Meteor Shower. We went to this one park, but after a couple minutes my dad said it was too dangerous to stay there...so we headed back home and went to the San Antonio Park a park with lots of trails. It was closed, but there were many people outside in a turnaround watching the stars as well. The meteors shot by so quickly, faint white streaks shooting fractions of a second. We stayed there for about a half hour. I spotted about 8 or 9 meteors. My mom said it was already 1am...but it couldn't have been, it turns out it was actually 12:03 when I checked the my cell...our car clock is still ahead by an hour.(-_-) Wah, my dad says I have to swim for 3 hours tomorrow because I at the xiaoye... double(-_-)

China Part 2!

In China part 2, I'm going to write about some of my travels in northern China. If I remember correctly, we flew from Huadu -> QingDao -> Jinan -> Taishan -> Shenyang -> Beijing's airport -> Huadu. We didn't fly everywhere, some places we drove there but I don't really remember which places we drove to. Anyways, the weather in Qingdao and Jinan was really nice! It wasn't humid at all, it was almost like Ca weather. The other cities were pretty hot though =/ and people did not speak cantonese at all so good thing I didn't really need to talk to anyone. Although, I think just by listening and trying to understand, my mandarin improved slightly.
Oh and yes Qingdao is home to the famous TsingTao beer, as you will see in my pictures (next time).


Here's a view outside our hotel, soo pretty right? =D This actually wasn't our hotel room, it's a really super high class expensive room with a wonderful view of Qingdao. Our room was a few floors below this one where we couldn't see past the huge wall of that building. It's a bit of a long story to explain how we got to see this room so I won't go into it, hehe.


It's LeeHom! Wahaha water! =P J, didn't you see a lot of these in Beijing?


Ok this place was at a water pump factory. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside where the employees were working so I took a picture of them eating, haha. Well, I did take a picture of the security room with all the screens that show what the security cameras pick up but shhh, I didn't read the sign until I took the picture. =P We got a tour around this place and got to see their engineers build parts of a water pump. It's really interesting how they train their employees. They showed a video of the training and it's seriously like bootcamp where they learn how to march and everything. But instead of training them for war, they're being disciplined to provide excellent customer service and to be excellent engineers etc. They're all in uniforms and they walk in a single file line to come to work and leave work, it's crazy! And they have motivational quotes in large signs everywhere. Some of them were really corny so it was kind of funny.


Then we went to the beach. Their beach has merry-go-rounds and water bumper cars!


and a gym!


It started raining so we went to sea world.


Polar bears! My pictures here aren't too great because of the lighting and because bears/fish/animals just move too fast for my camera. I took a lot of pictures but they were mostly blurry. There were all kinds of underwater creatures here, sharks, dolphins, turtles, etc.


Penguins! That was nice of them to pose for me.


Hehe, apparently these eskimos are really hot =P These people just basically sit around, chat and pretend to live in this cabin and pose for people who want to take pictures. I think randomly, one of the guys would do a handstand or something.


Swimming with the fishes! Or he was just cleaning the glass but still that's pretty cool, well except it might be hard cleaning the shark tank.


Little girl feeding dolphins =)


We saw a dolphin show! It was my first time ever and I really enjoyed it, even though the emcee spoke in mandarin so I couldn't really understand him. I have videos of the show but maybe I'll post it some other day. Dolphins are super playful! Before the show started, a girl trainer was trying to ride on the dolphin but then she kept falling off and the dolphin kept spraying water at her, so cute! I think dolphins have become one of my favorite animals now. =D

Stay tuned for next week's post on China part 3! =P
This week I have finals and projects due but nothing really new is going on with me. Oh and I told you guys I got a mac right? I'm really liking it, especially after my pc caught a virus somehow, but I'm still getting used to some functions. There are so many shortcut keys I need to learn...

Hong Kong!

I like the new layout! =) So here are my pictures from hong kong, I actually didn't take that many. We were only here for 2 days and we didn't know anyone so we kind of just walked around the mall connected to our hotel (it was really big!) and walked around the streets in the extreme heat. We were going to go on a tour but then they didn't seem that interesting and they only had mandarin or english tours, so that would mean either I wouldn't understand what was going on or my parents wouldn't. It was fun though, we randomly stumbled upon different stores, restaurants and tourist spots.

It's sai yeung choi street (type of vegetable)! I thought it was cute. And they had a "sai sam" (washing clothes) street but I didn't take a picture of that.


Food in Hong Kong is pretty good. These veggies were yummie. =)


Here's a pier and a tourist spot we randomly walked to. It was actually a pretty far walk from our hotel but good exercise! My mom pointed out that the shorter building in front looks like a turtle. There's the head and the claws if you can see it.


A lot of people here! Where they're standing, I think it's called the Avenue of the Stars.


It's Bruce Lee. =P


Jackie Cheung's (the singer) handprint and signature! There were a whole bunch of famous stars and their handprints all along this path. I saw Jackie Chan's too but when I thought to actually take a picture, we were already way past it.. =/


We had a vegan meal! This looks and tastes like barbecued pork but it's not meat! And if I remember correctly, I think the other dish is potato leaves. It tasted pretty good but it's really expensive.


Double decker bus! We didn't ride one, we just rode in taxis a lot. It seems like the taxi drivers here are more talkative than those in China. Maybe it's because in China they have to concentrate on not running someone over or crashing into other cars. =P And one taxi driver told us that it's hard being a driver now because of the swine flu, not as many tourists.


Here's the mall that was connected to our hotel, it had american brands also. You can see at the very bottom they were displaying a lot of Transformers things. And they have one super long elevator that goes up several floors.


Random street in HK. They seem to have a lot of banks here.


Until next week! I have a lot of homework to do this weekend. =(