a thousand bald fat guys
there's a regular deluge of pictures coming onto my computer the last few days. my computer has become the home for several of my computer-less co-workers, which works out great for me, because that means i get copies of their pictures. last time, i put up some of rachelle's pictures. now i have even more of hers, some of karen's, some of tammy's, and some that i finally took myself, using karen's camera. i'm tellin' ya, as soon as i get my first paycheck, i'm spending most of it on a new camera.
i'm finding jinan a much more scenic, cool city than shijiazhuang. it turns out we live just a 15 or 20 minute cab ride from a place called thousand buddah mountain. a group of us went there yesterday. aaron and i both had work at three, so i was a little worried about getting back on time, but it's something you can do in just a few hours. it's strange to me that such a cool, foreign experience is as close and accessible to me as that. and cheap, too. i want to go back when there's snow on the ground.
that's almost all of us who went (all but jen, who was climbing some rocks at the time of this picture). it's aaron, rachelle, me, gary, clara, claire, and dustin.
there was some temple-kinda stuff, but that didn't seem like the main focus. the temples seemed more like places that were hard to tell apart from the gift shops as we climbed.
i didn't see a thousand buddahs, either. then again, we didn't see everything there. apparently there are some dead cool caves. even though i saw the movie the descent, i still want to check said caves out sometime:)
the thing about "climbing mountains" in china is that there are lots of stairs. in switzerland, there were paths and tree branches to grab onto. in china, there are just stupidly uneven, worn down stone stairs everywhere.
you see the stairs on the far left in that picture? those are the kind of stairs i mean. and many that are less stairs than big rocks stacked on top of each other.
once we got to the part where there were a considerable amount of steep stairs, i fell behind, unsurprisingly. every chinese person who passed me on the path tried to strike up a conversation. last time i was here, these attempts were all in vain. this year, though, i can converse a little. one guy in particular climbed most of the way with me. at some point, he was trying to say something to me about iraq, i think. i'm ok with my chinese being too bad to be able to discuss that:) he wanted to be friends afterward and asked for my card, but i said i'm a pretty busy person, sorry. that's always a little awkward.
so as i huffed and puffed my way up the stairs as slowly as my little heart desired, the others zoomed up and claimed the peak for westerners everywhere.
this is a cool picture of the city. isn't it smoggy? smoggy, but cool looking. next time i'll try to go on a clear sky day.
we went down more slowly and carefully. and took pictures every few feet.
at the end, you could pay 20 yuan and take a slide part of the way back down again. we did that and it was pretty flippin cool.
i'm finding jinan a much more scenic, cool city than shijiazhuang. it turns out we live just a 15 or 20 minute cab ride from a place called thousand buddah mountain. a group of us went there yesterday. aaron and i both had work at three, so i was a little worried about getting back on time, but it's something you can do in just a few hours. it's strange to me that such a cool, foreign experience is as close and accessible to me as that. and cheap, too. i want to go back when there's snow on the ground.
that's almost all of us who went (all but jen, who was climbing some rocks at the time of this picture). it's aaron, rachelle, me, gary, clara, claire, and dustin.
there was some temple-kinda stuff, but that didn't seem like the main focus. the temples seemed more like places that were hard to tell apart from the gift shops as we climbed.
i didn't see a thousand buddahs, either. then again, we didn't see everything there. apparently there are some dead cool caves. even though i saw the movie the descent, i still want to check said caves out sometime:)
the thing about "climbing mountains" in china is that there are lots of stairs. in switzerland, there were paths and tree branches to grab onto. in china, there are just stupidly uneven, worn down stone stairs everywhere.
you see the stairs on the far left in that picture? those are the kind of stairs i mean. and many that are less stairs than big rocks stacked on top of each other.
once we got to the part where there were a considerable amount of steep stairs, i fell behind, unsurprisingly. every chinese person who passed me on the path tried to strike up a conversation. last time i was here, these attempts were all in vain. this year, though, i can converse a little. one guy in particular climbed most of the way with me. at some point, he was trying to say something to me about iraq, i think. i'm ok with my chinese being too bad to be able to discuss that:) he wanted to be friends afterward and asked for my card, but i said i'm a pretty busy person, sorry. that's always a little awkward.
so as i huffed and puffed my way up the stairs as slowly as my little heart desired, the others zoomed up and claimed the peak for westerners everywhere.
this is a cool picture of the city. isn't it smoggy? smoggy, but cool looking. next time i'll try to go on a clear sky day.
we went down more slowly and carefully. and took pictures every few feet.
at the end, you could pay 20 yuan and take a slide part of the way back down again. we did that and it was pretty flippin cool.