My Favorite Photos I Missed!

Miscellaneous photos that didn't make it into the rest of the blog. Get ready for a lot of randomness without explanation hahaha


Train ride from Beijing to Xian


LOL Jay you sneaky sneaky






Lol um what


Wouldn't totally recommend the haircuts in China, unless you want the hair stylist cutting you off and saying "I know what you want" hahaha


DA KA BEI

My two favorite meals in Hangzhou :D



Xiao Chi's Chao Mian <3 <3 (the noodles were very comforting and tasted just like Chow Fun from home)


Literally me every week


CREW PICS









Outside our favorite Jiu Ba called 9 bar


This club was too much LMAO
















Peace out

再见中国!!! 谢谢你很甜蜜的回忆!! <3 <3
(Goodbye China, thank you for the sweet sweet memories)

Last week in China (Dec 17, 2016)

China was a really amazing experience! I've made lifelong friends, and I'll forever cherish the memories I made here. Although I wish I could've forged more personal connections with other Chinese-born students at my university, I definitely learned a lot from the Chinese people I did meet here and gained a greater appreciation for my family's culture. I will always have a special place in my heart for Hangzhou, and I'm gonna miss all the amazing people I've met!

My lovely classmates

Tufts-in-China fam


My kouyu and jingdu teachers (speaking and intensive reading)


These cute kiddos


And my friends from around the world

Had to do one last excursion!




Going all out at waipo jia




One last look at the sweet sweet baked goods at Dr. Bread :(



Ready to head back to 洛杉矶! (Los Angeles)

Sightseeing in Hangzhou- Jiuxi with State Street Hangzhou Advisors (Dec 10, 2016)

We finished our State Street internships, giving our final presentations in front of the whole team of advisors! Ming and I were on the gamification team. We used our experiences on what makes certain video games fun to see if we can add some of these game elements (like points, rewards, characters, etc) to an online investment application to make it more appealing. Basically we got paid to play games; I'm not complaining!


Gamification crew

To celebrate, two of the State Street advisors including mine invited Ming, Anh, and me to this beautiful area called Jiuxi, which means to cross a river 9 times. It's a walking trail that takes about 2 hours from start to finish and follows along the side of a river. Apparently you can cross the river 9 times by small rock paths, although we didn't do it- the rocks were too narrow!




The scenery on the walking path is very pretty, and the river reflections were cool too!


There's a beautiful lake in the center of the area- it was really nice to see how pretty Hangzhou's trees are in the fall.


My friend Ming took this amazing picture of the lake.


The end of the trail led us to a village right near Longjing. As soon as we got there, an old lady approached our advisors and invited us all into her home for fresh pecans (really sweet and yummy) and Longjing tea! We got really lucky!


We finished hiking around noon, so we were hungry! Our advisors were very generous to treat us to lunch at this Hangzhou cuisine restaurant called Green Tea. It's really popular here (as popular as waipo jia "Grandma's house"), and we had to wait 40 minutes for a table.


The food was worth the wait! We tried some beef curry, delicious sautéed potatoes, eggplant, mapo tofu, and a really spicy local fish. Plus these yummy green tea pastry cookie-like things.

People are probably wondering if I'm sick of Chinese food by now. The truth is I'm actually not super tired of it! When I go out to eat with my Tufts group, we generally mix up our meals enough with other cuisines occasionally like Korean, Japanese, Pho, and even sometimes American food (Ken deji!!!! KFC). I probably eat more Chinese food with my classmates.

We actually also discovered a really good pizza place in a random alley near campus. The pizza's made by a Chinese guy, but it's even considered good by my Italian classmate who I saw there one time!

Sightseeing in Hangzhou- Da Yunhe (Dec 4, 2016)

Last weekend and this weekend I visited Hangzhou's Da Yunhe (Grand Canal). It's a really pretty area with a large canal in the middle and lots of free museums in the surrounding area. I went first last weekend because my class had a field trip together, and then this weekend I showed my Tufts friends because none of them had had a chance to come the first time.


Here's the entrance walkway. It's already lined with long strings of red signs saying "Merry Christmas!" I thought it was weird/funny.

First, we checked out the fan museum, which had lots of traditional Chinese fans like this ancient one, used to fan kings as early as the Han dynasty.



Beautiful embroidered fan


This one tricked me because it appeared to be a plain white fan, but look closely and there are tiny tiny Chinese characters that my eyes couldn't even read clearly.


Can you see them? :O


Next, we went to a knife/scissor museum. Sorry for the bad pic quality here- took some pics of photos that were on my computer.

These swords were from the Bronze age during the Han dynasty.


A more modern Tang Dynasty steel sword


I've never seen a museum display a whole collection of just scissors before, but Hangzhou's actually famous for them!


We also checked out the umbrella museum with this cool entranceway.





Lastly, we went to the handicraft museum that has a few cool demos you can try, like paper cutting, chopstick engraving, umbrella making, even making fabric cakes. We engraved our own chopsticks as souvenirs!


Next to the fabric cake-making place, I saw a little table with all of these bubbles with presidents in them and thought they were funny- they must've been made of fabric too. You can spot Obama, Putin, and many others!


After, we took a walk on the bridge in the center and got this really nice view of the canal. :)


An old man flying his bat kite over the canal around 4 pm


And here's my class lunch from last week at this fancy Hangzhou restaurant right next to the museum area entrance. Really delicious food and not too expensive! We got sweet and sour pork, eggplant, cauliflower, a mushroom/pork dish, and some kind of Chinese root vegetable.