In a few hours I'm leaving Ningbo, which means I'll be headed to my last Chinese city of the summer: Beijing! I'm excited, especially since I've already been there once (in 2006) and look forward to re-seeing my past favorites. Our final presentation is on August 1, and my flight leaves on the fifth. That means that I'll have three whole days of sightseeing and shopping.
Ningbo is a very nice city of about 7 million people, although I didn't realize it at first. You see, the university that we've been staying at is not actually located in central Ningbo, but rather in a suburb. This means that to get to the more interesting parts of town, you have to take a 30 minute taxi ride (but because taxis are so cheap here, you end up only spending about $5 per cab, each way... you could also take a bus, but it takes twice as long and doesn't save you that much money). Downtown Ningbo has a large public square (and mall) overlooking a river. Surprisingly, there is a large, very European-looking Catholic church/cathedral in the middle of town. The first time I went, they were having a fashion show in the public square, and the selection of Western music that they chose was... interesting. At one point they played "Woo Hoo" (by the 5.6.7.8's) right after "Waka Waka Africa."
Last weekend we made a side trip to Xi'an, a very historic Northern Chinese city which used to be China's capital a few hundred years ago. The trip was very insightful and also a pleasant and much-needed work break. Some of the things we did include seeing the famous Terra Cotta Warriors (there's a lot of them!), riding bicycles around (and not just beside, but actually on top of) the city walls of Xi'an, and seeing a giant pagoda built in honor of a Buddhist monk who made a five-year journey to India to retrieve Buddhist scriptures (a well-known Chinese book, "Journey to the West," is very loosely based on his life).
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