One week during the school year BCIS celebrates the country by having a host country week. Grades 4 through 9 go away to places in China. The 5th grade class went to Datong, a city in Shanxi provence. We started the trip by taking  a 6 hour train ride from Beijing to Datong. The train ride consisted of playing Uno, Killer Bunnies [which I brought], and talking and hanging out with friends.

    

    The first day we went to the Yuyang Grottoes and the ancient city wall. The grottoes are statues carved into caves from ancient China. There are thousands of these statues where we went and the smallest is only bout 2 inches. The largest are lots of feet high. There are lots of holes in the grottoes because once an emperor ordered to color them. They made the holes and you couldn’t see them but as the color wore away they could be seen again. One other cool thing about the grottoes was that they told stories.

 

    After the grottoes we had lunch at a local restaurant, and then went to our next touring site which was the ancient city wall. The wall was not what most had expected. It was a dirt wall so it was crumbling everywhere. After the wall we went back to our hotel. Ritika was sharing a room with me and we decided to work on our journals.   We then had dinner, play time with whole class then went to bed.

 

    The next day the first place we went to after breakfast was the Hanging monastery. This is a monastery that is literary placed on a cliff and supported mostly by long beams. It is very cool but a little freaky when you are actuallye on it because you feel you might fall. You also have to climb a lot of stairs to get to the monastery.

 

   The last place my class went to on this trip was to the Wooden Pagoda. It was a nine story building and was very cool. That was the last thing we did that was touristy. Then we went back to the hotel and hung out before we had a six a.m. wake up call [which we slept through] and then went on the 6 hour train ride back to Beijing.