The Emporia Gazette

May 27, 2012

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In 2000, my grandpa came back from China with lots of things for us.

I asked him when I could go with him, and he said I was too small.

He said I could go after I was 10. This year was my time to go to China at the last of May. My grandma went along so we could go visit places while Grandpa lectured at normal colleges. I got to see lots of China.

I had to get a passport made. Then we sent it to the China embassy for a Visa so we could get into China. We flew on planes eight times. This was the first time I had ever been on a plane. Each time we had to hand our passports to an officer. He looked at me and then checked his computer. Then he stamped the passport. Then we went through a police check. You have to send your luggage through a machine to X-ray it. You step through a door and if you set off the bell, they wave a thing around you and sometimes pat you down.

We flew to Washington D.C. and then to Beijing and then to Hong Kong. The plane to Beijing was very big and it took 13 hours to get there. That was a long boring time. We went near the north pole. Grandpa says if you take a string on a globe and connect Washington D.C. with Beijing, that is the shortest string.

Hong Kong is a real big city with tall buildings. I rode the Star Ferry across the harbor. There were Chinese junks and big ships. We visited Hong Kong International School where my grandpa taught in 1975 to 1978 and where my mommy and uncle went to kindergarten. The associate headmaster was a very nice man and showed us the classrooms. It looked like a really cool school with wonderful teachers.

We took a train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou. Just about everyone is Chinese there. My hair is blonde so everyone looks at me because I am different. Many strangers wanted to take their picture with me. Two students from South China Normal University showed us around the campus. They were very friendly. The weather was hot. There were mosquito nets over the beds. We started medicine before the trip so we wouldn’t get sick if we got bit. They said this wasn’t a big problem anymore.

We flew to Guilin. A graduate student from Guangxi Normal University took Grandma and me on the Li Jiang River tour. The mountains go straight up and down, just like Chinese paintings show. We were always squinting because the sun was so bright. So we bought sunglasses. I got to walk in a plastic bubble across water.

We took a sleeper train to Kunming. It took 22 hours. Everyone on the train was Chinese. There were six bunks in our berth. A boy my age was in the bunk across from me and his mother was on the top bunk. Everyone was friendly. We could see the countryside from the train. All of the flat land with dirt is farmed and right up to the edge of the railroad. The villages are poor. They don’t use big tractors like we do in Kansas. They farm by hand, or use water buffalo.

There are old temples and gates and walls everywhere. Kunming has lots of flowers. They fly neat kites in the park. Students from Yunnan Normal University rode with me on a bicycle for three people. We went to a big zoo with lots of animals. At night there was a festival and I got to feed a carrot to an elephant. We stayed in a military hotel where all the workers wore army uniforms. The university had a museum about their history and the anti-Japanese war. They remembered their students and teachers who died back then. Grandpa said he would explain it to me some day.

We flew to Dalian, up near Korea. It is a modern city and not as crowded as the other Chinese cities. There were beaches and rock gardens and we visited a museum about Chairman Mao. They had 10,000 different Mao buttons!

We spent the last four days in Beijing. We went to a new church on Sunday. It was a big building in the center of the city. They spoke English. Most were young Chinese university students. They had Bibles that were printed in Nanjing.

We visited the Summer Palace which was not as hot as the rest of Beijing. Beijing has lots of parks. The playground equipment is different than ours. We saw Buddhist temples in most cities and many Chinese come and bow three times and put incense in the burners.

We also visited Tiananmen Square. It is a big open place. Their Congress is on one side and a history museum on the other. Mao’s tomb is there too. There is a really big palace. It is where the emperors lived and common people couldn’t go there so they called it the forbidden city. Anyone can go there today. It took a long time to go through all the inside gates and rooms.

The Great Wall is really, really big. It is pretty steep and you can’t just run along it. It goes on and on as far as you can see. There are places to shoot arrows down, just like on a castle.

The professor and students from Beijing Normal University were very nice to us, and our room was neat and had a TV with lots of channels. There was an English channel. Other channels had cartoons and you could understand them even though they were in Chinese. Everywhere they gave us lots of Chinese meals but I was glad that there were McDonalds restaurants in China.

We finally flew home. It was a long flight. I slept a lot. We got back at 2:30 in the morning. It was good to see my family and dog, and be home in my bed again.