The Great Expanse

The plane ride home is a grueling thirteen and one half hours. These are some stunning pictures I got at different parts of the trip. My favorite are those of us coming into Chicago because that meant I was sooo close to being home for the first time in a month, and that meant that I could take a hot shower, have homemade food, and drink water out of the tap.

Even though I was so glad to be home, I loved being in China.

Chinese English

All of these pictures make me laugh because of how odd the translation is. I once got yelled at for this, but I know that the Chinese laugh at me trying to speak their language, so its good all around.

Propaganda

China is infamous for its propaganda to the people. In all of these pictures, it shows happy, healthy, and strong people. This makes it seem as if their people should always be happy. Most of these paintings were created during the communist reign of Chairman Mao.
I feel bad for the people of China, because they are always exposed to propaganda that is trying to brain wash them into believing that everything is better than it really is.

Olympic Park

Olympic Park was a great place to visit. I went inside the Water Cube, and it was unbelievable to think that this was the place that four years ago, Michael Phelps made history with his eight gold medal streak. I felt like I was in the presence of royalty.

China Up Close

Everything is so different, yet similar.  These textures are individual to places in China. It interests me to see how elaborate everything is up close from the scaffolding of the Water Cube (above) to the carvings in wood at every temple (below).

Beautification

For the 2008 Olympics, Beijing planted thousands of flowers to make the city look more appealing and beautiful. This was amazing to me, because I grew up on a farm where flowers were every where and it made me feel right at home. They had so many different varieties of flowers too. It made me super happy to discover something new.

Children

The people in China are different than those in the U.S.A in many different ways, but one that stood out to me, was that they actually encouraged us to take pictures of their children. If you tried to take a picture of a child in the U.S, their parent would most likely call the police.

Many of the children that we saw thought that we were extremely strange, but they always smiled at us no matter what. The personality that many of the children had was also extremely funny because many seemed to be silly and outgoing.