Traveling to a foreign country is almost always a life changing experience. Many of my experiences in China affected me in a positive way and caused me to think more critically about my lifestyle and culture. Now that I am back in the United States, the experiences I had in China are still influencing my life. Below are two accounts of my life since the trip which describe how I tried to recreate my experiences in China.

The food in China was delicious even though it frequently made me sick. I ate all kinds of exotic foods like donkey meat, fermented eggs (that were black in color), lamb kidney, delicious eggplant, dragon fruit, cucumber-flavored Pringles, and more. Although it seems like I feasted throughout the entire trip, the portions were much smaller than in the United States. The food was also lighter because mostly everything was cooked from scratch and served with more vegetables than American meals.

"...you have to obliterate the cucumber..."


My favorite dish, Chinese cucumber, was commonly served as a side dish or appetizer. The dish is similar to a cold cucumber salad that is served at most family reunions and summer barbeques in the Midwest. I decided to try to make the cucumbers at home. Cucumber salad? How hard could it be? After I failed miserably to make something resembling the Chinese dish, I resorted to a Google search and found the secret to the recipe:

You have to OBLITERATE the cucumber with a chopping knife. I don’t mean cut it, either. You have to lay a wide knife on its flat end on the cucumber and bring your fist down like a hammer onto the surface of the knife, point-blank style. The cucumber should basically internally combust and be lying there on your cutting board with its seeds pitifully seeping out of its sides. Then you can cut it into chunks and mix it with rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, chopped garlic, salt and pepper, to taste. The cucumber fragments will have jagged edges and exposed seeds to soak up all that yummy dressing. Though treating your cucumber like this may seem a bit extreme, your taste buds will thank you. When I tried to make this the first time I gave my cucumber a proper death and it did NOT turn out the same.

"...feeling like I had been run over by a bus..."


In addition to making Chinese food at home, I have also been exploring the great outdoors like I did in China. I went on a hike last weekend to the Bridge to Nowhere in Azusa, CA with some friends. My body had been anxious for that familiar feeling I had so often felt in China – feeling like I had been run over by a bus. We went on some pretty challenging outings throughout the program. Luckily, I made a friend during the trip that also enjoyed such intense things as sprinting through the Shanghai World Expo on a souvenir rampage and sprinting down a 3,000ft elevation mountain. Climbing the Great Wall and Mt. Tai Shan was like being chained to a Stairmaster for 6 hours straight. Perhaps the most relevant among many significant sites on Mt. Tai Shan was the Abandoning-Oneself Cliff. One day my friend and I got lost in the city. We found our way back to campus at 1:30am after the party animals had already come home in a taxi. We calculated that we had walked about 15 miles that evening while sightseeing and trying to find our way. Needless to say, the hike to the Bridge to Nowhere was going to need some 3-headed dogs along the way to compare to what I was used to in China. The hike proved to be relaxing and fun. The guide took us through a canyon where we followed a gentle stream. The water was so clean and cool that I would have been swimming in it if I had brought my bathing suit. It was a decent workout and I can’t wait for my next opportunity to go on a difficult and beautiful hike right here in Los Angeles.

"...it seems as if we work tirelessly for that magic that the universe creates naturally..."


Being in the serene mountains of China and Los Angeles is a lot like being in a huge metropolis like Shanghai or Chicago. These two places sound very different at first because they are opposites. However, they are also one and the same. Are the sweeping volumes of space between the skyscrapers not similar to the huge slices of negative space in the atmosphere created by the mountain ridges? Are the city lights of Shanghai so different than the buzzing and chirping of the jungles at night? I envision the mountains and undisturbed native world as the thriving civilizations of nature, the hidden world of flora, fauna, and spirit which we do not fully comprehend. I wonder if one day we will be able to use examples from the architecture of the forests, the landscape of the river beds, or the transportation networks of the animals in our built environment.

There simply is no monument or building that can create a sense of awe in me like nature can. There were many times when I was in the Chinese countryside that I could see for miles. It would be ridiculous to wonder how many square feet (miles) a mountain covers, or how much a boulder in a field is worth. We live by different rules than nature. The places which nature governs are outside of the human realm. We as Artists, Designers, and Architects use the current built environment as a reference for creating spaces, which consequently, often do not harmonize with nature. It seems as if we work tirelessly for that magic that the universe creates naturally. How far are we from nature’s fundamental rules of place making?
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