Today is our first official day in China. It has been a day packed with sightseeing, eating interesting types of foods, and many other things. First we went to the winter palace, a big palace in the countryside somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. The winter palace is next to a hot spring, making pools at the winter palace nice and toasty. Yay for pools, which I would love to jump into right now! Anyway, the winter palace was a place where the emperors and empresses of the Tang dynasty went and lived for the winter. It was big and impressive. The most exciting part of going to the palace was all the people wanting to take pictures with us. There were lines of people lining up to take a picture with the white skinned wonders. I felt like a celebrity.
After the winter palace we went to a factory that made replicas of the Terra Cotta warriors. We got to see people making the mini replicas, so that all tourists can bring home with them a reincarnation of the 8th wonder of the world. Did you know that they are all made out of clay? Well, now you do. After seeing the replica warriors we got to go and see the real deal. There were 4 different pits with the warriors in them. Pit one was the biggest and contained more than any other . In Pit 1 we saw rows and rows of the warriors built to help their emperor in his afterlife. Many of the warriors were broken though, because the emperor’s people did not like his way of ruling. So they killed most of his “army”. How rebel they were.
After experiencing the 8th world wonder we continued on to the Quin ling underground palace. I don’t even know if that was a real palace, it seemed more like a touristy thing to me. Anyway, it wasn’t that interesting, because I don’t even remember that much about it. Lastly we went to the Xi’an City replica museum. It wasn’t that intriguing either, so I won’t say much about it. It was pretty much a small replica of Xi’an. Looking at this mini city I had a flashback to my memories of visiting Legoland (in California), where in it there were also city replicas. But of course China is much hotter and muggier then California. And no one looks at you like you are a sea monkey from outer space. After all of this adventure we went for dinner. This dinner is worth mentioning because we ate 18 different kinds of dumplings, including flavours like walnut, squid and red bean paste.
The last activity of the day was going to a fireworks and lights show. The lights in the show were very high tech and they displayed a story. But the story made no sense to us whatsoever, due to the fact that the characters were talking in Chinese. It was cool to see the interesting things that one can do with light.
All in all, today was long and jam packed, but I think we all learned more about the Chinese culture. And in these coming days we will learn much more.
Kia Van Laare
New Westminster Secondary
3D Premier Elite Member
