Today I ate breakfast for the first time at our hotel in Xi’an. It was just as delicious as our breakfast at our last hotel. I had rice and fresh watermelon. The breakfast even served French toast, American cereals, and chicken nuggets. After eating a filling breakfast, I boarded the bus and headed to the Children’s Village.
The Children’s Village is an orphanage for kids ages 3-20 whose parents are in prison. Most of the parents that are imprisoned for theft. When we arrived at the village, we were taken into a room to watch a short video on the orphanage. We learned that the entire orphanage runs on donations. After learning about the Children’s Village, young children preformed for us. The young boys and girls sung songs and danced for us. Although the kids were cute, it made me sad to see them performing for us because most of them did not like they were having fun. I felt that the orphanage had them dance and sing for us to make us want to donate more.
As we walked around the orphanage, we saw that eight kids share one room and there is one caretaker for every 16 children. Then we played games with the children such as basketball and jump rope. I felt bad for the kids because some of them didn’t look like they wanted to play with us. William translated that they were tired. I felt bad that they had to play with us on their day off. At noon we ate lunch in the children’s cafeteria and I just had plain white rice. We then took the bus to the Greater Wide Goose Pagoda.
The pagoda was beautiful, but I thought all of the Buddha statues were even more beautiful. The group rubbed a happy Buddha’s belly three times for good luck. After explore the area, we went inside for a calligraphy class. Unfortunately, we did not learn to write our names in Chinese characters, instead, they tried to just sell us things, such as jewelry and paintings.
For dinner, Jordan, Nilaani, Maddie, and I walked through streets similar to the Muslim Street for about a half an hour before finally reaching Pizza Hut. You can tell that this group of us really misses American food. The craziest part of our night was sitting in the back of a boxed in motorbike and having someone drive us back to the hotel that spoke no English.