I am back in Chicago now and it is great. It smells a lot better and the air is cleaner and the sky is very blue. It’s really nice to be home and especially sleeping in my own bed because sometimes it was hard to get a good sleep in China. I also do miss China because I think I was just starting to get used to it. We also had to endure another 14 hour plane ride which feels like it will never end and when it did everyone was really excited that we were back home. We took the plane from… Continue

Continue

Our last stop was Shanghai, and it was amazing. I had been to China so many times, but never had the opportunity to go to Shanghai. This city was spectacular with bright lights everywhere, and a skyline you could not imagine. It looked like a futuristic city and a place where I could see myself living when I grow up. When we first got off the bus, there were people everywhere. We were surrounded by huge crowds everywhere. This to me was like the China that was showed in the movies and pictures.… Continue

Shanghai was the place to be. The city is in its prime, sprouting the tallest building in the world, hosting the

World Expo, and becoming more and more internally developed. It is easy to say

that Shanghai was by far the most exciting area we visited in the entire

trip.The city seemed to be constructed right on top of water.…

Continue

Sitting at my desk, reflecting about China from my own chair, with all of the home comforts I’d been missing over the last two and a half weeks, it strikes me again how much I actually do

miss China, now that I’m back. Our amazing trip started in Beijing, then took

us through Xi’an, Luoyang, Suzhou and Hangzhou, culminating in the amazingly

multicultural Shanghai. I think that, by far, Shanghai was my favorite city. To

me, it…

Continue

In shanghai, the first thing we did was go to this garden that seemed to be right in the heart of the city. The garden was beautiful, but what I remember the most was that it was extremely crowded there. I figured

that it was just crowded here because this was a huge tourist attraction but it

turned out that everywhere you go in shanghai is extremely crowded. After the

garden we ate dinner. Dinner was fine. After dinner we went on a boat down the

river…

Continue