Weller's crazy life!

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Nanjing

My weekend is tues/wed at work bc the normal weekends are crazy busy at our school. my friends and i decided to go to nanjing for the two days we had off last week. we took a train there and back.....so fast...1.5 hrs on the way there and 1 hr 15 min on the way home..i love it! i slept most of the way on the train b/c i was super tired.......and then i woke up to amazing green hills and tall trees.. i miss green hills and tall trees!

this is our high speed train

once we got out of the train station we quickly found the lake and walked around it. we had a slight agenda of things we wanted to do during our trip...but it was nice to just wander and stumble upon things. it was pretty hazy out....so the colors are a lil gross in the pics.

the lake

fishing

bamboo

city wall

cool bridge

me in front of the city gate

after wandering around the lake for a bit we stumbled upon an old part of the wall where we could go up and walk on it. so, we paid 15 rmb and ran around the wall. no one else was on it.....very cool!

phil, megan, me and erik on the wall

no one around!

each brick has names of the people that built the wall

cartwheel time

pagoda

entrance to part of the wall

after the wall we ate some lunch at a random lil spot....luckily erik is fluent in chinese so he could read the menu and order for us :) we then took a cab to dr. sun yet sen's mausoleum. he is buried at the top of this mountain. we had to hike up a lot of stairs...but it was worth it.

relaxing before the hike up

view from the top..amazing. lil hazy....but still gorgeous with all the trees

we made it to the top

we checked into our hotel, dropped off our backpacks and took the metro. now the metro only has 2 lines, so we had to ride it! we got these cool lil blue tokens as our tickets. we decided to just randomly take the metro somewhere and then walk to where we were gonna go. we ended up walking about 1.5 hrs to get back to where we were going...but we saw so much of the city.

candied hawthorns

lights at night

crazy lady that wanted a million pics with us and then followed us around to buy pics from a professional guy

the art of jenga at a bar

wed am we got up, had some curry and then headed over to the nanjing massacre museum. it was pretty interesting.....for sure had a cheesy and bias aspect to it. we then headed over to the presidential palace where both sun yet sen and chang kai-shek both lived for a bit.

massacre museum

entrance to presidential palace

the gardens

thanks for a great trip!

yay hibiscus

fun rock maze

Thursday, October 28, 2010

recap of vietnam

i have been back from vietnam for about 3 weeks now......so, i am sorry for lagging on blogging about. i hope everyone had a chance to look at all my pics. i took about 800 pics, but after editing and narrowing things down i was nice and only posted about 400 pics on facebook. 400, yes i know that is still alot....but narrowing them down was so hard!

vacation time! tara and ben met me inside my metro station, since my line takes us to the hongquio airport (local airport) it only took about 35 min to get there..not bad at all. we had prepared ourselves to be in crazy lines at the airport, but it wasnt bad at all....we were shocked. our plane was delayed about 2 hrs, but we weren't stressed b/c we had a 6 hr layover in guangzhou...yes i said 6 hrs. we were very limited on what flights we could b/c all of china was traveling this week. we brought uno cards with us to pass the time in the airports......people were very into watching our games, hahahaha.

pics at the airports:

ben likes to sleep alot! ( we are still in shanghai)

we love uno

iphone fun

we paid for our visa's when we landed in hanoi and they gave us usd as change. last time i will be holding usd for a long time!

hanoi: we ended up getting to our hotel about midnight. we settled in, watched some tv and got to bed. we woke up, showered, had a delicious bfast made in our hotel for free and then headed out into hanoi. walking around, we realized that something was going on...ya something big. hanoi was celebrating their 1000 year anniversary as the capital of vietnam. we happened to get there on day 2 of the festival..unreal! the whole city was decorated!!!! we wandered around hanoi all day...it was pretty hot. i got an amazing tank top tan line and great lines from my rainbow sandals. not nearly as hot as shanghai....but still hot! hanoi is a great city. we stayed in the old quarter. each street has a theme to it (metal, gold, sewing, food, etc)

around the corner from our hotel, food stand

zippers

buttons

the gate of a pagoda

gorgeous old woman

ho chi minh's mausoleum, unfortunately his body was in russia for a few months to get worked on. i really wanted to see his body!

they have plumeria's in vietnam!

president's palace

pagoda

military museum

military museum(i feel like this could have been taken in the 1970's)

military museum

night market

cute kid and her dad

tara and ben at dinner

ben and i

halong bay: we got picked up at our hotel in a taxi and then we got transferred to a bus to take us on a 3 hr journey to halong bay. driving thru the countryside was gorgeous. however, i did get a lil sad when thinking about how much we destroyed of this country during the war. the ppl we met in hanoi were so nice and so vibrant!