10 days wandering in colorful Mexico!

Sunset at San Miguel de Allende! 

Though the way I got to Mexico and the way back was extremely awful and I cried a lot at the greyhound bus station and airports, still, never regretted going to Mexico for Spring Break!

1 Dangerous? 

"Hey Girl, you are crazy! You cannot go to Mexico alone."

"I have a friend who got kidnapped there and lost three fingers."

"You'll be kidnapped/ raped..."

Before the spring break, these were the sentences I heard from my friends.

To be honest, I was a little bit scared. 

I'm glad that I came back with all my fingers!

The way from Mexico City to Guanajuato. It reminds me the pic below!

This is the Classic windows XP background

Taking the bus to Guanajuato was my first time leaving Mexico City. I was told that sometimes there would be robber jumping on the bus!
So I put all pesos in my b-r-a (blushing). I couldn't believe how stupid I was doing that!
After I finally got to the city, I realized I had more dollars than pesos. So maybe I should hide dollar bills instead of the pesos.

The only moment I felt scared was the first night I arrived in San Miguel de Allende. Every alley looked the same! It was 8p.m. and I was lost.

I kept walking until there was no one on the street. Only the male drivers passed by and whistled at me.

There was a second I thought about the worst situation I can meet.

Finally, I saw a church when I passed by an alley. So I walked towards the church and finally got back to my hostel.

The bus I took from Teotihuacan to Mexico city stopped at the center of Teotihuacan. We were asked to get off the bus.
All the men were asked to face the face and put their arms on the bus. Police with guns searched their body! I was so shocked!

Except this "scaring" experience, the places I went to were safe!

In Mexico City, all the police carry fire-guns. I've never seen so many real guns in my life! And the police were nice even when I accidently trespassed. 

In Gunanajuato, I can walk at 10 p.m. alone outside with all the happy and dancing people!

Few hours before I lost in the small town! Beautiful Sunset!

It is convenient that you can send and receive text messages to American numbers for free when your phone can connect with a telecoms operator, Telcel in most conditions.

Met two girls from Finland. We all agree that if you walk outside at 2 a.m. in any big cities can be dangerous. 

So be smart!

Cannot stop laughing when I saw this in the Anthropology Museum.

"Man, I have a blue day."

2 English?

After landing at Mexico City airport, I decided to take a cab.

But, I didn't remember the name(Zocalo) and there was no internet at the airport.

So finally, I asked a gentleman helped me. On the way to the city center, the driver was trying to talk to me. "Hablo no Espaniol"..

The two days I spent in Guanajuato, a city four hours driving away from Mexico City, I stayed with an old lady, who doesn't speak English at all. With my poor poor Spanish and Google translate, we had a great time.

When I met someone talked English to me in Guanajuato, I was so excited and talked to him! So I got a free Spanish translator for an afternoon!

Even in Mexico City, young people don't speak English, which pushed me to speak Spanish.

A pink church! 

By the time I left Mexico, I can use my broken Spanish to ask the price, ask the way to go and how can I get there.
But, the spring break ended when I began to love speaking Spanish!


3 Food-√
The most meals I had in Mexico were Tacos, which was not surprising at all.
Tacos varied from 5 pesos to 35 pesos, with or without cheese, beans and etc.
Whether the food was good or not depends on if I can read their menu.
Love the ICECREAM there!
One of the happiest moment was I bought two awesome mangos with 6 PESOS, which equals 50 cents. Wish I could live there just for the mangos!
Had a shot of real tequila! Keep firing the class until it started blue fire. Use a straw to drink it as soon as possible!

Zocalo right before the tequila.

Well, it's much nicer than the ones I tried in the States!



4 Fate!
Traveling alone and living in hostels is the best way to meet different people from different countries.
Met a nice Japanese girl who quit her job as a midwife last year and started traveling around. Wish her all the way good luck!

The Japanese girl! She was grabing the 6 PESOS mangos!!

A girl from Argentina, who once worked in a city in China super closed to the city I attended primary school!
A guy can speak English from Guadalajara, Mexico, who saved my afternoon! He's the only person I can really talk to during the two days in Guanajuato. And he bought me a not-so-sweet ice cream!

Guanajuato. The light blue big buildings are part of the University of Guanajuato.

Chinese girls study at Columbia Uni, also as exchange students. We went to the pyramids in Teotijuacan together. Without them, I guess I won't go there by myself.
We went to a wrestling game the last night I stayed in Mexico City.I could not say I enjoyed the game but it's a totally new experience.

People were stretching to absorb energy from the sun.

It was not difficult to get to the top.  But you have to wait for more than hours under the burning sun!

A lady from Oregon led me to the super pretty market in San Miguel de Allende. Wish I could be rich enough to buy the super awesome handcrafts there.She gave me an English-Spanish dictionary! Have more reason to study Spanish!
It was the fate that I could meet all the nice people during the travel. Though I was alone, but not lonely at all!
The two nights I stayed in Guanajuato, I stayed at an Spanish lady's house, who doesn't speak English at all.

The view I had in Guanajuato. Sitting on the roof, I feel like I owned the view all by myself!




Love Mexico! Be smart and open-minded, then everything will work perfect for you!

Almost EVERYTHING about Chinese New Year

1 When and How long?

The Chinese New Year is the Jan. 1 on Chinese Lunar Month Calendar, which is made according to the moon. 

2014, the New Year is this coming Friday, Jan 31. 

Also, we'll call our New Year Spring Festival. It usually lasts from a week before New Year to Lantern Festival (Jan.15 of the lunar calendar.)

Pic from Internet

Take my family as an example, the whole family members are businessmen, working in countries all over the world. So we only gather together during the Spring Festival.

My parents will have a two-week break. They do nothing but have big meals, meet people and sleep, which are not very "Chinese."

All my friends in China are having their winter breaks.

2 What year?

In China, we have 12 animals to represent each year. 

2014 is the Horse Year. People who was born in 2002,1990,1988.., this is your year.

In China, wearing something red (usually underwear, socks ) in your year will give you luck the whole year!

So 1991 was Sheep Year, 1992 was Monkey Year, 1993 was Chicken year and so on.

3 What do we do?

The biggest thing for Chinese family is having a big dinner on the New Year's Eve. 

The Dinner has its name.

People usually have the dinner at home. But nowadays, going to restaurants is more convenient.

Since 1979, the national TV station (CCTV) has been running the Spring Festival Gala every year on New Year's Eve. So Chinese are used to watch the gala during the dinner.

The gala is well-prepared every year, though younger generation found it was not really interesting these years.

2013, Celine Dion was invited to sing in the Spring Festival Gala.(She was gorgeous!!)

Since my family lives in countryside, so we are allowed to set off fireworks. If you stay in my hometown on New Year's Eve, you'll be amazed by the fireworks at midnight (or annoyed..).

Hong Bao with Lucky Money

Kids can get Hong Bao with Lukcy Money from parents and relatives.

Cannot get Lukcy Money is the most unfortunate thing to be away from home during Spring Festival.

This is my face when I get Hong Baos.

Usually, you can get Lucky Money until you begin to earn money. 

Most parents will say they'll help you keep your Lucky Money when you are little, which means you'll never get it back.  I didn't realize the truth until my middle school!

Why Lucky Money?

In the Chinese legend, there was a monster call Nian (Year in English) or Sui(Age in English). The monsters only hurt kids during night. Somehow, someone found if they put money in red packets under the kids' pillows, the monsters could not hurt kids anymore.

Then it becomes a custom. (I'd say "Thank you, Nian or Sui monsters!")

4 What do we eat?

Well, it really depends.

In the north part of China, people eat dumplings (jiao zi). In my hometown, we prefer to eat rice balls( tang yuan), which means family reunion.

Almost every dish has its auspicious meaning.

 (Ignore the head..I was terrified every time I saw the heads.)

Fish sounds like Rest in Chinese. People wish they have extra money at the end of years.

Rice Cake (Nian Gao) means get promotion every year.

It can be any shape. This is a fish Rice Cake.

Nowadays, people tend to eat healthier during the Spring Festival. 

It is quite a lot to eat during the Spring Festival. In my hometown, everyone will invite all the relatives and friends to serve a big meal in fancy restaurants. So you'll have big meals twice each day basically, which means a lot of food.

Happy Chinese New Year!!!

PS: pictures are all from Internet.

"Play with the Border" Road Trip to Police Station?!

The first road trip in America ended up super surprising. For the first time, I was caught by the police and went into the border police station!!!

Now, I have three life time friends!

Tiezheng Zhu was my high school classmate, who attends Purdue U. Since I came to America, we planed to do some trip together.

Finally, the "play with border" road trip gang has two guys and two girls. Though it was the first time I met the other girl and guy, we'll never forget each other now.

We picked the Niagara Falls as our destination. But the road trip was not smooth at the very beginning.

My roomie' school mom gave me a ride to the airport. After I successfully arrived in Chicago and waited my friends for 4 hours, they finally made it to the airport.

CHICAGO!!!

BUT. After we look to each other for a half hour, Xueying Wang, the other girl said over the phone: " I feel we are not in the same place!"Then we found out we were at different airports. They were at O'hare while I was at Midway.

Because the heavy traffic, I took the train to Chinatown and they drove to there as well. It began to snow. I walked around for more than one hour in the Chinatown at the snowing night, looking at the people sitting in the restaurants.

Had an awesome REAL Chinese food, we left modern Chicago, heading to Niagara Falls!!!

12 hours later, 3 a.m., snowing Niagara Falls city, here we are!

It was the thanksgiving day! So obviously, no restaurants!

Wandering in the small city with snow, life became peaceful.

Just SNOW everywhere!!!

The pigeons were super lazy.. I had to get off the car to drive them away...

The way I walked..

The other side is Canada!

Walking on the thick ice with rains... It actually colder than it looks!

Beautiful Iced Chairs!

Lovely Snowy Car!

We left in the second day morning.

I admit that the Google Maps is handy at the most times. But not this time.

We chose a way without going to Canada but somehow it led us across the border. 

We paid $3.5 and then, we were on the Rainbow Bridge. (US citizens don't need Visa to enter Canada)

Until then, we realized we were on the wrong way. The google maps showed us across the border!

There's an arrow sign before we got to the Canada tolls. So we followed the sign and took photos of the Niagara Falls on the Canadian side.

Out of America!

I thought it was a toll station...

"Yeah! We traveled to another country!" We were super excited and waited in the line to go back to America until we realized the line was not a toll station.

The police were checking the Visas and Passports...

Obviously, we had no visa to travel in Canada.

The police asked us for the passport and I-20. (Zhu and Wang happen to have the papers with them)

We were asked to park the car and went into the police station.

Sitting together, we signed, laughed, talked about the future and guessed what would happen.

"Will we be deported back to China?"

"What if we can never come back to America?"

"It's not a big deal, don't worry!"

"I wanna finish the study and become a journalist!!!"

"Maybe we have to pay a large amount of money."

"We should write the experience down! We can tell our kids this magic trip!"

We were asked to stay in the building!

I imagined thousands of results in the half hour. Almost crying..

It turned out we were free easily!

A staff called us and asked us what happened. We told everything. The staff checked our visas.

He could not help but laughed after knowing what happened to us.

5 mins later, we were signed to leave.

I never thought I would have this special experience.

The half hour was like ages. It was long enough to make us life time friends.

Walking outside the police station, I breathed the air of freedom again!

The first road trip in America, travelled one thousand miles to the Niagara Falls, enjoyed the snow and the amazing Falls, caught by the police for the first time ever.

Super happy to see this toll bridge when we drove back to Chicago!

The Big Bean!

Walking in the super cold and windy Chicago!

Where is your BLOOD comes from?

Scene #1/ Sep.10, 2013 / OU Cousins Matching Party
Almost one month after I came to America.
I met a girl there. I am so sure she is a Chinese, at least an Asian.
We start to talk. 
I was surprised, because of her English.
She was adopted from China when she was a little kid. 
"I cannot remember anything about China," she said.

Scene #2 / Sep. 19, 2013 / My OU cousin's car
We matched at the matching party. 
She told me she was a Germany American. Some of her uncles are still in Germany.
Some of her relatives are from other countries in Europe.

Scene #3 / Oct. 2013 / Tarah & Brittany's place
I still remember it's my first time to go their place. A lovely home!
They showed me the YouTube clip What kind of Asian are you? 

To be honest, I didn't really get the video at the first time. (Maybe because of the  exaggerated British accent.LOL)
Found this comment.. Hahahahahahahaha

But after this video, I began to realize that the people in this country are not as I thought...


Scene #4 / Oct. 2013 / Huff Gym, outside the racketball room
I take the racketball class this semester.(Super love it!!!)
Somehow, two other students and me becomes parter every class.
One of them is a guy. He seldom smiles (getting better now!) and looks like an Asian.
I was thinking he was from Korea or Japan or Vietnam every class.
Finally, I asked after one class.
"Hey, where are you from or where your parents from?" 
"My parents are from Vietnam," he answered.
Maybe because I've been to Vietnam before, I was excited and wanted to which city.
"Hey, which city are your born? Saigon?" I asked.
"I was born here. I'm an American," he answered.
I wish I could disappear at that moment after his answer.

Scene #5 / Nov. 8 2013 / New York Pizza 
After Gary's great talent show, all Gary's fans went to New York Pizza for dinner together.
(I'll just use letters instead of names)
Because girl A said something like I wanna learn more native American things so we began to talk about the native American.
Girl T told us a part of her blood is native American.
Girl B said "Well, maybe just your left hand is native American."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. 
Then somehow, my brain stopped working. 
I asked Girl B "Where is your blood comes from?"

Scene #6 / Nov. 8 2013 / Maria's place
I talked about the funny native American thing with Maria's roommate.
She said she was asked  "What are you?" after she said her parents or grandparents(I'm not sure..) are from India.  
Maria asked me "where are you from?" 
Hmmmm.. I think I'm just Chinese, or more specifically, my blood is from Wenzhou City.
And she asked Maggie, a girl from Hong Kong. 
It's a more complicated question. 
Since Hong Kong has been under China since 1997, only 16 years after 156 years under British rule, few Hong Kong people would say they are from China.


---------------
I come from a small city in Wenzhou, where the families' per capita incomes are relatively high but still conservative, especially when involves marriage.
"First criterion, he should be a Wenzhounese," my mom said to me when she thought I was old enough to have a boyfriend.

It takes two and a half hours to fly from my hometown to Xi'an, where my university locates.
I was shocked when my roommate told me her grandmother is from Sichuan, a province in middle part of China.
Another girl's father is from Shandong, a city in east part in China, while her mom is from a city near to Xi'an.
(The reasons that their grandparents and parents can meet each other are all history reasons.)

In China, the controversial household registration system causes many conflicts.
For example, students cannot attend the college entrance examination in other cities except where their household registered.
Also, it is super attractive if the company can help you move your registered permanent registration.
So everyone has a permanent tag. Beijinger, Shanghainese, Xi'anese....


--------------
We always say America is a melting pot. 
And now, people begin to try to show their distinctions.

Forgive me, I'm still the "frog in a well," still feel it is wonderful to find out people from different continents can live together so well.


------------
Ok, last question. Where is your blood comes from? 

What do you do with the Internet in China?

What do you do with the Internet in China?
An exchange student from Spain asked me when he got to know that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were blocked and even Google cannot work well in China.


The Great Firewall of China
Our ancient built the Great Wall to defense other nations' offense and made it a wonder of the world.
During the last ten years, the high-tech government has been building an invisible great wall to prevent his people to be "eroded" by the whole world.

The huge amount of people is isolated from the whole world.

Back in China, I tried a lot of ways to "climb over" the wall.
Thanks to the smart high-tech geniuses, it's not that difficult to jump out and explore the world outside of China.

Usually, I used a VPN to fake my IP address. But as you can imagine, it worked not very well. I was kicked-off by the world sometimes.
And you have to pay if you want more stable Internet.

The Great Firewall is really powerful and loyal.
The New York Times was blocked in China after a long story about our premier Wen Jiabao's rich family.
And the next day, you cannot find the website anymore.

The story about Wen Jiabao. It's a fun read!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of-wen-jiabao-holds-a-hidden-fortune-in-china.html

And yes, even the Blogger is blocked in China.
So my friends cannot read my blog in a normal way.
But the strange thing is there were two hits from China and after half months, they disappeared.

Pictures from Internet

Facebook & Twitter
In the past two months, one of the most frequent questions I was asked was "can you use Facebook in China. When I answered "no," everyone was shocked.

It is most probably because the July 2009 Urumuqi Riots. Urumuqi is the capital city of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The government believed they used Facebook and Twitter to organize the riot and spread the information. After that, you'll find fewer and fewer Chinese on Facebook.

Because there are few friends on Facebook and we have a Chinese version of Facebook, so we basically don't use it.

But when I travelled out of mainland China, I was so excited that I can log into Facebook without a VPN.

But something interesting happened.

When Wen Jiabao, the sixth Premier of China gave a speech last year (I cannot remember the exact time), he mentioned he used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube several times.

The 2014 Summer Youth Olympic Games will be held in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. 

The government decided to tear down the Great Firewall for the athletes live in a certain area.

"The young athletes need to contact and share photos with their friends back home."

I have to say sometimes my dear government is very considerate.


What do we do with the Internet
Well, you may find strange that most Chinese post nothing on Facebook (if they have one account).
We do post photos and update the status like most people who have access to the Internet.

I met a girl who was going to do her Masters in history when I travelled in Vietnam.
She said that our government was so great. In order to protect the Chinese companies, they blocked the Facebook and Twitter. So the Chinese companies can earn more money.
I smiled all the way.

The Chinese companies created Weibo, Chinese version of Twitter; Renren, Chinese version of Facebook; Youku, the Chinese version of YouTube; Baidu, Chinese version of Google, etc.
Basically, we have everything in Chinese version, thanks to the Great Firewall.

All the websites are not bad and we had a lot of fun because of them.
But we are isolated from the world.


TV Programs
Most families don't have the foreign TV channels, which means we can only watch the Chinese TV channels.

Share an interesting story.
A visiting professor in my home university last year worked for CNN for 14 years. Though he left CNN, he still has friends there.
When he was in China, he could watch CNN and other American channel in his apartment, which was only for foreigners.
But when there's something negative or just sensitive things about China, the TV went black.
After the news finished, the TV came back again.
So sometimes, he had to ask his friends in CNN what did they talk about China.

Just imagine, there's a poor guy sitting in front of the TV with a button all day and all night.
He has to watch the CNN news carefully. When there's something not suitable to be on a TV in China, he pushed the button to block the news.
Oh, why we have this weird job!


Things are getting better
With the development of Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter since 2009, things are getting better.
More people have a place to speak out. Some government staff and even mayors were dismissed because people reported their misconduct on Weibo.

A high rank government official was sentenced for 14 years because of a photo.

Caida Yang smiled in a car accident spot. Then people found his watch was super expensive.

People found more photos of Yang and found he had a lot of expensive watches.
Finally, he was found guilty of corruption and sentenced 14 years.

This is one of the most famous case happened in recent years in China.

We begin to have voices and more power with the help of internet.
But still, the government, the Communist Party controls a lot.


I was really jealous and ashamed when Burma finally allowed their people to use Facebook and pulled down the censorship.
I really embarrassed and upset when people said "there's no press freedom in China" after they know my major is journalism.

Someday, I wish China, Chinese can really become a part of the Internet World.
The Great Wall is our pride forever, but the Great Firewall, should be torn down ASAP!