One Last Stop: Yangling

Before moving on to our latest adventures (which include the Forbidden City, Summer Palace, an old Hutong neighborhood, and the Great Wall), we want to wrap up our posts from our travels south that took place last month.

After leaving Xi’an we took a quick bullet train west to a city called Yangling.  Tyson was invited to visit a young professor at Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University.  While Tyson collaborated with Dr. Hailong and met with other faculty at Northwest A & F, the kids played outside in the area surrounding our hotel (which was located right on the university) or we took a walk to the massive amount stairs leading to the campus entrance.  We ended up needing three hotel rooms to accommodate our whole crew (most rooms only had twin beds).

Here’s a picture of Audrey in front of the steps leading up to campus.  I think we’d all be in better shape if we had to take these steps every day to get to class or work!  The kids had fun having me time them running down and back up again.  We often would visit an outdoor fruit stand and buy a pomegranate or another fruit and sit and eat it while “people watching”.  Wait . . . take that back.  Other way around.  We were mostly the ones being watched.

 Annie and Eli picking out what fruit we wanted to buy at one of the many stands available near campus.

Lena, a lovely graduate student Dr. Hailong had arranged to accompany us as needed while staying in Yangling, took us to the city’s complex of museums.  We had the chance to go into the “Insect” Museum, the “Soil” Museum, and the “Animal” Museum before the group was all “museumed” out.

 Our group with Lena, our gracious guide and new friend!

The “Animal” Museum’s taxidermist must have still been in training when he/she worked on these specimens!

Tyson was excited to see “soil” get it’s proper recognition with it’s own museum.  Part of the museum was dedicated to soil classification and some samples of them . . . of which we found one soil classification we had never seen before:  “White Zombie Territory”!

Our favorite museum was probably the “Insect” Museum.  Besides the usual bug displays under glass, we were able to see these elaborate butterfly mosaics made with real butterfly wings!  They were very beautiful.

Like I mentioned before, this trip was not all fun . . . but some work as well (for Tyson anyway).  Here’s Tyson giving one of his seminars on campus.

The last night we were there, we were taken out for supper.  We were told that we were going to a “farmer’s house” for supper.  Thinking we may have a meager meal of rice and vegetables, I had prepared the kids not to complain and to be thankful for whatever was offered.  Well, we didn’t get the whole story, but it’s our assumption the “farmer’s house” was actually just a restaurant (maybe he lived in the back?).  We were served more than 22 dishes at this meal.  Our favorite thing served was a kind of fried flat bread.  As you can see from the picture, we didn’t leave hungry AND no one was complaining about not finding anything to eat!

We headed back to our apartment in Beijing via bullet train Saturday morning after starting our journey on Monday morning.  We had a good time (although quite worn out) and are glad we adventured to visit another part of China. All of us were glad to sleep in our beds and be back “home” later that evening.  We would anxiously wait for our next excitement to come to this overseas experience . . . when my parents (aka Grams and Papa) would come to visit later in the month!

Thanks for reading!

–Stephanie