We worked hard each day, played hard each night. We weren't planning on sleeping much this trip and we were gonna see as much of Baoji as we could. First night we came here, some of the group was looking for a bit of an americanized style of chinese food, so we hopped on the tour bus and went over to a food court next to The People's Park. It had a lot of great options, but I was honestly still full from the amazing lunch we had at the hospital that day, so Tyler and I just walked around the park. The whole city sort of feels like Vegas, there are neon lights and signs and loudspeakers all over the place. Su Jiang-Tao and Tai Bin accompanied Tyler and me and the rest of the group as we wandered around the park.
It doesn't seem to matter where you are in China, there will always be families out doing group exercises. Looks like somebody's puppy is out here tonight too.
Here's that lunch I was talking about that kept me full through the whole day. There were amazing noodles. That bool in the middle is the noodles with a kind of spicy sauce. I had a bunch of those. In addition there were a bunch of yummy veggies. They seemed to add walnuts and peanuts to everything. After I was full on the cold noodles, this amazing ramen style soup came out and I think I ate two bowls!
The "authentic" chinese food was a bit much for some of the group, so the next day a request was made for fried rice. They did not disappoint. I ate a little bit of everything but the green beans in the middle of this picture (with walnuts) was the winner of this meal. Amazing. The mangoes were really good too.
In keeping with the food theme, the hospital treated us to a 38 course meal. This was at a restaurant called "Original Baoji"... they prepared a bunch of Baoji specialties and had some traditional chinese music and performances going on in the backgroud. I think I really enjoyed 27 or so of the dishes, tolerated the other 10, and hated their 1 special dish. I didn't bother to learn the name in Chinese, but in english, Tyler and I called it Formaldehyde noodles. It was terrible. I felt bad to offend our friends, but I just couldn't handle the stuff. Su Jiang-Tao dared me to eat another bowl with him and I did it. I about threw up right there in the middle of the restaurant, but I did it!
After dinner, Tyler and I realized we were just across the river from our hotel, that tall building beyond the bridge, and so we elected to walk home. Took some pictures as we went across the river. Melissa called and we chatted a bit on the bridge. 9:30 pm for me, 8:30 am for her. Wonderful end to a great day.
Our restaurant was the yellowish light toward the end of the lights on the right side. The big yellow building on the top left is the Baoji Bronze Museum. The big pagoda on the right is how China is everywhere.
Picture from doorway into the restaurant. The fella in front of me is our tour guid, John, (Zhang Hui-Qi). He is awesome. He is buddhist. Everyday he would tell me and Tyler, "Everything is perfect". He wants to to business with me in China. I'm not sure what we are going to do.
Dr. Koerner with his two of his daughters and grandkids, Angie and Kristen and Brandon and Max. Those two boys probably had 3 million photos taken of them while we were there.
Suzanne was a hygienest from St. George.
2/3rds of the hospital crew in the background of this picture.
Here's Su Jiang-Tao challenging us to a noodle eating contest. These were delicious and not formaldehyde style.
After dinner we decided to achieve some level of inner peace.
The whole crew outside the restaurant
It's china, but you can't get away from transformers. Here is a Camero and it says bumblebee on it. It seems like, generally speaking, the Chinese don't especially like to do things in an understated way.
Had to take a picture when I saw a near match to our minivan back home.
Tyler looks like he is 3 feet taller than these foot masseuse dudes. He really was just about 2 feet bigger than them. 2 hour massage - $30.
This photo represents our general attitude while in Baoji
We went to the Baoji Botanical garden. While there I found out that the first (and one of only two) female Chinese Emperors was from Baoji. (That's a little disputed, but if no one looks it up, it's cool for me to write it down here). One of the reasons I like her is because I have the same Chinese name as her. In China I am Aaron 武(Wu). We took a picture next to our names.
There was a little market outside the Botanical Garden. Really there's a little market everywhere in China. They served up some of Tyler's favorite, barbecue gluten arrows, and we got some watermelon and hung out with our friend from Australia, Ellen.
After the botanical garden, we had one more place to visit, The Jintai Taoist Abbey. This is the birthplace of Tai Chi. I didn't know about this, but Tyler has independently come up with another method of self-expression called "Ty - Chi". Needless to say, this was gonna be a special place.
This is where it gets amazing. These four monks were walking out of whatever they had been working on and stopped to chat with us. They found out about Tyler's Ty-chi and asked if they could put on a demonstration for us. This guy was UNREAL. He did a 9 minute beautiful Tai-Chi demonstration. Kicks, jumps, punches... the power was awesome to behold. For real!
After ascending this Abbey for an hour or so, we had no idea how big it was, we came to the top and found a 3 days festival was coming to an end tonight! There was a brilliant performance being put on on the stage. All I understood was something about beheading, but there was plenty of good food to be had. The music was fun to listen to, and people had were treating it like a drive in movie. But instead of cars they were on scooters and motorcycles.
Tyler told us the Bronze museum was really cool and so a bunch of us that were at the clinic the day before made a visit over to the museum at lunch. It's a little interesting how they do their schedules over there. They work from 8am to 6pm each day. The clinic is open 7 days per week. Each employee gets 1 day off per week and they stagger their days off. Because they have to be there all day, wether or not the work is done, they tend to take veeeeeeerrrrrrrrrryyyyyyy long lunch breaks. Sometimes they'll even change out of their clothes into regular clothes. It's like a big family at the office. They all hang out all the time with each other. It's crazy how much time they spend with each other. But I guess they don't have yards and kids to take care of outside the office.
This dude outside the bronze museum looked awesome. We told the kids smoking isn't awesome, but he does look awesome.
I like to imagine this is his winnebago and he's just touring the country.
Here's our group headed over to the Bronze Museum. This place was insane. It was free of charge to us. In the photo below is Anne from Boston, Karl (hidden from view), Lori from SLC, Suzzane from St. George, Kristen from Logan, Dr. Tsai from Taiwan, Christie from Boston, David from Taylorsville, and Angie from SLC.
This museum was huge and modern and clean,
Here was a little family visiting the museum that yelled out "Foreigner" when they saw me. So naturally I went over and said hello and talked with them. :)
Last night in Baoji and some of our friends from the hospital invited us to Hot Pot with them
We didn't know Karaoke would be going on prior to hotpot. The choice of songs was pretty funny. There were some popular ones and some songs the Chinese thought were popular but we had no idea what they were. I think we ended up singing "Fix You" by Coldplay. There is video of this... but it seems to have disappeared. Darn.
Hot pot was awesome. We sat every other seat, american, chinese, american chinese around the table. Pretty darn fun to have dinner with all of them who know just a teensy teensy bit of english.
One half of the hot pot was spicy and the other half was not spicy. The dinner tasted awesome. We got some "normal" stuff - beef, pork, chicken, tofu... and some not so normal stuff - cow stomach... Everyone had a great time.
There was a little bar where you could create your own dipping sauce with different spices and veggies and oils.
That was our last night in Baoji. When we made it to the Train Station in Xi'an to take the high speed rail to Chengdu, I indulged in a little McDonalds. It was pretty tasty.
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