May 23rd- Exploring Dalian!

As if the buddies weren't awesome enough, today was pretty much all planned by them! And boy was it great!

So our visit stop on today's trip was to a Russian-Japanese prison (in Dalian, weird right?). I must say, the place was extremely creepy! The conditions these people stayed in were dreadful, and any place with a torture room is not somewhere you want to be. Even the infirmary had plaques that told visitors about how the doctors would purposefully let these prisoners of war suffer instead of doing anything to ease their pain. The now museum even had an actual skeleton kept in the barrel it was originally stuffed into and eventually buried in! Everyone felt kind of weird on this stop of the visit, but the history was just too cool to pass up.

The next stop was also full of history. We stopped at a battlefield, full of caves soldiers used to hide in and replicas of the weapons they used to use. Okay, so I might have been having a little too much fun posing with the cannons, but can you blame me?? I can't believe a little town like Dalian can have so much history so close to home!

Being on the battle-field made us soldiers pretty hungry. So next we went ahead and ate at a place fit for warriors: McDonalds. XD Well, I guess we are keeping to the whole balance between American and Chinese cuisine so we don't get sick.

Our last stop for our trip today was at another museum. The building was absolutely beautiful and full of Chinese history and culture. There was one whole room just FULL of chopsticks from all different time periods, but my favorite room spoke about the religions in China. Throughout this trip, I have come to learn that there's a lot more to China than the things that come to mind. Past the communism, chop sticks, and the knick-knacks you might find in any Chinatown in a big city in the US, there are a lot of little subtleties to Chinese culture that I have really come to appreciate since I have come here.


The evening built on this love of Chinese culture. The buddies threw us a big party that was meant to celebrate both Chinese and United States culture. One second they were teaching us how to tie Chinese fortune knots, the next we were playing musical chairs! There was a ton of food ranging from fruits to more cake for David (late birthday cake!) to traditional Chinese deserts (one of which was wrapped in a banana leaf!). Sadly, a lot of OSU students ducked out early during the intense games of hot potato and musical chairs, but I stayed for the best part! Once the room was cleaned up, we went out to the beach to light floating lanterns! It was kind of hard to light them at first, but after we wrote our wishes on the paper lanterns and played with fire for a while, they were floating far off into the distance! It was an amazing bonding opportunity, and I was so glad I got to share it with my buddy, Lee.

The day has been amazing! I am so glad I am here in China and that I have met so many amazing people! Do I have to go home?