{"id":136,"date":"2016-05-29T08:12:24","date_gmt":"2016-05-29T13:12:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/china-2016\/?p=136"},"modified":"2016-05-29T08:12:24","modified_gmt":"2016-05-29T13:12:24","slug":"jinan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/china-2016\/2016\/05\/29\/jinan\/","title":{"rendered":"Jinan"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/del>The past few days has been a whirlwind and I am sure I am not alone saying that I am exhausted! \u00a0Between the palace visits, climbing the Great Wall, visiting factories and experiencing a lot of local culture, we have been surprised and proud of how much we have seen and accomplished in such\u00a0a small amount of time– our fitbits are happy, too. Yesterday we said Goodbye to Tiger and Mr. Liu, our amazing tour guide and driver for the previous three days and\u00a0boarded a high speed train from Beijing to Jinan. Today we explored Jinan in preparation for the week ahead. We visited some of the parks in Jinan and\u00a0saw not only beautiful views and some interesting wildlife, but also families enjoying each other’s company, kids playing with squirt guns with their parents near the blue green waters filled with hungry\u00a0koi, beautiful trees and buildings decorated with bright red lanterns, flowers and wreaths.\u00a0The stone walkways wrapped around the park\u00a0through\u00a0porous rock gardens and small bamboo, pomegranate and apricot groves. We sat with a man playing a traditional\u00a0Chinese Instrument, the Erhu, and listened to several of his\u00a0songs. Of course, our group piqued the curiosity of other park goers as we are a rather diverse group ourselves. Many people wanted to be a part of our group photo and many more stopped each of us wanting to take “selfies.” After, we\u00a0took a boat tour across several of the city’s adjoining springs, which Dr. Zhang tells us was a protective moat for the city in earlier times. Less congested than Beijing, Jinan still has\u00a0massive skyscrapers, plenty of pedestrians, taxis, buses and mopeds zipping by in every direction. Toward the end of the day, we experienced a Chinese “supermarket,” which reminded me more of a mall without walls separating the stores. They have\u00a0a couple\u00a0of whatever you are looking for, in case you were wondering.\u00a0To us, the experience was overwhelming, but to the Chinese patrons, another\u00a0day at the store. A mother fixing her daughter’s hair, a\u00a0young\u00a0couple and their child grocery shopping. Life as usual. We all got a few\u00a0snacks to\u00a0keep in our\u00a0rooms and came back for the night. Tomorrow, we go to college \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

ps: camera trouble, will revisit picture situation at later time. Sorry!<\/p>\n

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The past few days has been a whirlwind and I am sure I am not alone saying that I am exhausted! \u00a0Between the palace visits, climbing the Great Wall, visiting factories and experiencing a lot of local culture, we have … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":369,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/china-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/china-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/china-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/china-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/369"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/china-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/china-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/china-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/china-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/china-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/china-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}