Well first of all, I am back from China. I got back six days ago–last Friday, but between getting caught up and getting over jet lag and watching two weeks worth of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, I’ve been a little delayed in getting a blog post up and out. But now is probably the best time, so here goes.

I won’t give a full review of the China tour, because you got a pretty good idea from my recently-posted itinerary, and when I get back from my next excursion (see below) and renew my Flickr Pro account, I’ll upload my 440 pictures from the trip (plus I’ve still got to catch up on my picture uploading from Sojourn).

However, by no means did the trip go according to plan, and that statement has both good and bad connotations. For starters, I got sick. Luckily, it wasn’t one of those illnesses endemic to China–good thing too, because with the four shots that I had to get before I went that made my left arm swell up big time, I would have sued Kaiser Permanente had I gotten one of those. Instead, I brought some kind of a cold with me from San Francisco that affected my sinuses on Thursday (the day after we arrived), and by Friday, I knew instinctively from waking up that I had a fever, so I ended up spending the whole day on Friday in bed sleeping and watching CNN International in my hotel room, which meant I missed the first concert. However, apparently sleeping for a full day and drinking four bottles worth of water is the right kind of treatment for whatever I had, because by Saturday morning, I was feeling almost perfect, and that afternoon, I successfully climbed a long portion of the Great Wall. And that’s a great feat for someone who was hardly strong enough to get up the previous day–climbing that wall IS NOT EASY.

There was one really interesting fluke that happened on Saturday night, which kind of caused a bit of a glitch in the trip. That was actually the first night that we didn’t end the day feeling all groggy because we had mostly adjusted to the timezone, plus we didn’t get back to the hotel super-late that night. In addition to our dinner, the tour group had organized an option for whoever was interested to go to a massage parlor right next door to that night’s restaurant. We had been told that there would be three groups going to dinner that night: Those having the massage first and then dinner, those having dinner first and then the massage, and those having dinner and then going right back to the hotel because they chose not to have a massage. I was among those who turned down the massage, but as you can imagine, almost every chaperone took the massage, thinking that they would be split up between the before and the after groups. Instead, when we got there, they had everyone do the massage all at once, so there were virtually no chaperones during our dinner. The perfect storm was setup for what happened next: Apparently the restaurant that evening didn’t get the word from the tour company that because we were American kids, we were not supposed to be served alcohol. Not only did the waitresses bring two bottles of beer two each table, but they even opened them up without anyone asking. Needless to say, you know how teenagers are, especially a bunch of teenagers as reckless as the ones in the Aragon group were, so apparently it came out the next morning that some people had grabbed a bottle of the stuff before they were finally taken away from us and had partied in their room that night. That led to a very uncomfortable group meeting the next morning, and I’ll leave it at that.

We did have some good things happen on the trip. For one thing, our third concert (the one that was at Peking University on Monday evening) turned out to be a major event. It wound up being a major benefit concert supporting the victims of the Sichuan province earthquake, with Tianjiao (our tour company) making a donation and our school’s music department making a donation, in addition to the full cost of the tickets from the event being donated to the relief effort. The Chinese government also got involved, and so the concert was supposedly broadcast nationwide on CCTV, the Chinese national television service.

Overall, I think it went really well, and I’ll probably be writing a bit more about it later on. Overall, it was a good trip, aside from the routy kids and the repetitive nature of the food.

However, my June traveling is not over yet, as this weekend I’ll be going to the American Legion California Boys State, to be located at California State University, Sacramento. Essentially, it’s a week-long mock state government thing which I was nominated by my school to attend as their delegate (and that means all expenses paid!). I don’t have a very comprehensive schedule of what we’ll be doing (which means I’ll have to blog quite a bit more about it once I get back), but here’s some of the highlights:

The entire thing starts this Saturday, June 21st, and it ends the following Saturday, June 28th. On Saturday, I’ll meet with the local post of the American Legion down in San Carlos where we will be bussed over to Sacramento to register, check in, etc. We then have some meetings, a bar examination (eek!), and some more meetings on the first day. The rest of the week is pretty much similar meetings and activities.

In this mock state government setup, there are two fictitious parties: the Federalists and the Whigs (nineteenth century, anyone?). Elections are held for city, county, and state offices, with everyone being assigned to a particular city (and thus, a particular county) on the day that we arrive. Within cities there are five Councilmen, a Clerk, a Treasurer, and a Superior Court Judge; within counties there are five Supervisors, a Clerk, a Recorder, a Treasurer and Auditor, a Tax Collector/Assessor, a Justice Court of Appeal, a District Attorney, a Sheriff, a Superintendent of Public Schools, and a Coroner; and at the state level, there is a Governor, a Lieutenant Governor, a Secretary of State, a Controller, a Treasurer, an Insurance Commissioner, an Attorney General, a Superintendent of Public Instruction, one State Senator per city, two State Assemblymen per city, and seven Supreme Court Justices. In addition, within each political party, a chairman, secretary, and yell-leaders are chosen. They also have a newspaper staff that’s open to volunteers for whoever is interested in bringing their laptop. (I’m considering it, depending on whether or not that conflicts with running for one of the offices…)

Beyond that, the other significant thing happening is on Thursday when we get to visit the State Capitol to meet our own local state legislators, presuming they’re in their offices. Finally, we’ll leave early on the morning of Saturday the 28th, returning home in the late morning.

So, that pretty much gives you an idea of the day-to-day of this thing, or at least as much of an idea as I already have so far. The Marx Brothers song “Hello, I Must Be Going” is certainly quite appropriate in this context, especially since I still don’t feel like I’ve fully recovered from the China trip, but I’m on my way off again for another grand adventure! Luckily, this one won’t involve two 12-hour flights.

Tags: beer, Beijing, Boys State, California, China, concert, earthquake, Great Wall, illness, itinerary, mock, Sichuan Province, state government, tour, trip