Citygod Temple!

My absolute favorite picture: Old Shanghai (the Temple) meets new (Bund skyline in the background).

Elephant statue we found

View from the street market outside the temple

McDonald's, of course!

A woman worshiping one of the main deities

Men chanting and praying

Local deities

Offerings are made daily

 

 

Finally had a strong enough connection to upload some more pictures! These are from last Friday's day trip to Citygod Temple.

Last week was pretty normal (it still feels weird saying that because I'm still IN CHINA). I had my very first Chinese test, and it went surprisingly well! It was just a normal test, but it was still longer than my final was for Chinese last semester. Woof. This Friday's day trip was to an old market-it would've been really nice but I was freezing the whole time! Then they took us to Piro's, which is a bar my friends and I really love going to that's owned by a CIEE & Penn State grad. We split into teams of 6 and had a hamburger eating competition, where we had 3 minutes to eat as many mini hamburgers as possible. My team won! I only ate 3 and the two other girls on the team only had 3 between them, but the guys were beasts! We ate 32 hamburgers in 3 minutes!!! We won 500 kuai ($1 American is about 6 kuai) to split between the six of us at Piro's.

This week should be pretty uneventful-cultural classes start this week so I'll be doing martial arts on Monday and learning how to make dumplings (Jiaozi-饺子) on Friday! My Chinese class is going out for lunch on Thursday, too. Maybe I'll actually start working out regularly this week? Maybe not...

P.S. It was great to hear of Roncalli's boys basketball team beating Cathedral! I remember how awesome it was when we beat them my senior year (am I old enough to talk about "glory days"?)-thankfully this class of seniors wasn't stupid enough to try to do the Lebron James powder trick like we did! Good job Bradley Fey!!! As a former babysitter, I'm taking full credit. =)