Nanjing Massacre Museum

by Matt Dela Peña

Just in case the message wasn't clear...

Among all of the places we visited in our first week, none struck me more than The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. For all intensive purposes, I prefer to call it the Nanjing Massacre Museum. But for a city whose wounds are still raw from a long and catastrophic war, it's understandable why a generic, three-letter name simply does not suffice.

Nanjing City Wall

by Matt Dela Peña

In order to consolidate his authority shortly after the proclamation of the Great Ming Dynasty (大明), in 1368, the Hongwu Emperor transferred the imperial capital to the mountainous region of Nanjing (南: "south", 京: "capital") and commissioned what would 600 years later be one of the best preserved city walls ever built.

Surviving China: Counting to 1000

by Matt Dela Peña

After you have zero to ten memorize, the rest of the numbers are fairly easy and straightforward.

Chinese college life

by Matt Dela Peña

东南大学

Last Friday, Southeast University threw us a welcome banquet! We were pretty stoked since it was the first meal we would be having outside of the canteen which, by that point, some of us were already dreading. Interestingly, the university also assigned a handful of their own students to attend the dinner in an attempt to facilitate an interaction between us and our direct Chinese counterparts, something I personally was looking forward to when I decided to take this course.

Surviving China: Basic numbers

by Matt Dela Peña

How to count in Chinese is probably the most important thing you need know when you go to China. Paying by card and getting receipts back are, in fact, not very common. So first, here's a cute girl who shows you how to count with your hands in China. Yes, it is very useful.

China: Shocks of culture

by Matt Dela Peña

I call myself a 'wanderer-in-training' simply because I really haven't been to that many places throughout the world. I want to be a certified wanderer, but I haven't had the means or drive to do it. And although I was born in the Philippines and lived in different parts of the West Coast, I can't really say that I've experienced what you would call a real "culture shock". That is, until I went to China.

Aloha wau ia Hawai'i: My top 5 O'ahu experiences

by Matt Dela Peña

One of the perks of going to university is that the students you attend it with tend to hail from different parts of the world. In the case of my school, a lot of these folks come from the state of Hawaii. Before I met my college friends, the extent of my knowledge of the 50th state was just that—it was the 50th state (and I guess Lilo & Stitch).