This picture was taken from inside the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai. The floor was a thick sheet of glass. It symbolizes the fact that the global engineer must place a certain level of trust in his or her host culture in order to be successful.

a view looking west over the xi hai in huang shan

The walled off, isolationist China that our grandparents knew is no more. China and it\'s people are getting up to speed, becoming informed, producing and consuming more and playing an increasingly important role in global politics. The China our grandchildren will know will be one that is entirely globally engaged.

the Jade Belt bridge at the Summer Palace

the great wall near BaDaLing

near Tian Tan

This photo was taken candidly at the Horticulture Expo in Kunming, Yunnan China.

We scaled the sacred Taoist mountain called Huashan and watched the sunrise from the East Peak. This photo was taken at the top of the peak just after the sun had risen. Th locks and ribbons shown are connected to the links that cover the entire mountain with the promise that they will stay there forever.

This picture was taken near the West Peak of Huashan. The man in the picture had to scale down a ladder on the side of the mountain to reach the isolated point where he is standing. The red ribbons that line the area and the color of the mans shirt represent luck and good fortune.

This photo was taken at the Camel Petting Area in the Xi\'an Zoo located in the Shaanxi province of China. Visitors could pay 5 Yuan for a bowl of carrots to fee the camels. It would then cost 0.5 Yuan to use the bathroom to wash off the camel spit from your hands. Worth it? We thought so.

This photo was taken in the 700 year old farming village called Dangjia. The village is laid back and peaceful and is self-sustained by the small number of families that reside here. The houses, however, were dilapidated and we found many stones, like the one pictured, resting in abandoned alleys.

I had just arrived to Kunming on my first trip to mainland China, with limited Mandarin skills. This was the first street sign I saw, leaving me confused which direction I was headed. In hindsight, it represented all of the directions from which I would find learning opportunities.

A photo of me and a young one dancing in one of the many markets in Shanghai. Wandering about the \"antique\" market I happened upon a little boy shaking it up in the middle of the street, with no music. Intrigued I decided to do some cross-cultural exchange.

The bikes parked outside of one of the engineering buildings at Tsinghua University.

Outside of the Yashow clothing market in Beijing stands this man who fixes ANY pair of shoes. The shoe he is currently fixing in this picture belongs to a fellow IREE participant who had broken it while walking about 15 minutes prior.

These are the sky stairs in the Jiankou section of the Great Wall. We went on an ecotourism overnight hiking trip and got to climb these, which are near vertical, though surprisingly easy to climb up.

This picture was taken from Jingshan park in the middle of Beijing. Note the juxtaposition of the old-style Chinese buildings with the modern city skyline in the background.

Within the first two weeks of being in China, I became acutely aware of the lack of safety protocols.

Taken at Hongcun, a UNESCO world heritage site in Anhui Province. The characters, meaning luck, are hung upside down because the chinese word for \"upside down\" sounds like the word \"comes.\"

Two sisters share a moment by their family\'s water pump. Taken at the Xilingol Grasslands in Inner Mongolia.

Our first exposure to the quality of Chinese products: a $25 USD bike broke within the first fifteen minutes. Miming/talking with the campus\' workmen, we were able to fix the bike.

This is a street at my host institution of Xi’an Jiaotong University. The beautiful trees lining the campus streets often stood in contrast to the utilitarian architecture of the campus buildings.

This is a picture of bamboo at the Horticultural Expo in the city of Kunming. Although I found the characters carved into the bamboo beautiful, a friend confirmed what I had suspected: it is just ordinary graffiti.

This is a picture of a road in Tibet on our way back to Lhasa from a Mt. Everest base camp. Tibet is a place of diverse landscapes, much of it desolate but all of it captivating.

This picture of sunbeams was taken at my host institution of Xi’an Jiaotong University. Although I thought the prominent sunbeams were beautiful, it is likely that I could only see them because of the dust and pollution in the air.

I learned a lot about the different cultures and ethnicities in China, including Tibetan. A deeply religious people, Tibetans often stack stones “toward heaven,” as seen in this picture.

In the small field below the Karo-la glacier, there was a vast array of small flowering plants that dotted the landscape. Not only were the huge mountains and ice-melt waterfalls amazing, but also the small details on the ground.

For the Dragon Boat Festival, our Chinese students took us with them on a trip to Hangzhou, from which we took a short trip up the mountain to the tea plantations of Longjing Village.

Climbing Huashan at night to see the dawn from one of its peaks is a tradition that many Chinese partake in, and here are the Heavenly Stairs leading up to the East Peak. It was fun to climb when you could see, it was even more fun when you couldn\'t.

On our trip to the Great Wall, there was a significant amount of climbing that we didn\'t quite expect.

These cylinders are covered in Tibetan Buddhist scripture and, when turned in a clockwise direction, would be equivalent to reading these scriptures as prayers. Often, the walkways in monasteries would be lined with several for pilgrims and monks to turn as they walk past.

During our stay in Hong Kong, we bought a couple of these mysterious fruits from a street vendor. However, we then realized that we had no idea what they were, how to open them, and how to eat them. Luckily, the street vendor was super nice and showed us that the skin was pretty soft and tears just like foam, who would have thought?

IREE 2010 meant getting used to a whole new set of cultural customs. Including, but certainly not limited to, dog shoes.

IREE 2010 meant getting used to seeing people everywhere. All the time. Everywhere we went, there were always people, at all times of day, regardless of rain or shine.

IREE 2010 meant exploring a semi-foreign culture more in-depth than I had ever before. Through this experience, I learned so much about what it means to be Chinese and what makes each Chinese unique in his or her self.

Depicting the sorrow and sadness I felt after seeing the rubble that remaining in Yushu after the April 2010 earthquake. This young boy aids a Tibetan monk over the rubble of a collapsed temple. The monk’s painful expression indicates how exceptionally devastating this event remains.

During prayer at a Tibetan Buddhist temple, I wasn’t going to photo, not wanting to interrupt the serious praying atmosphere, until a monk told me it was ok. This young monk noticed me, turned around and started goofing off instead of being serious in his praying. Well, boys will be boys!

What else need to be said!!!!

Huashan is well known as one of the most dangerous hikes in the world. We debated for awhile if we should trust Chinese engineers who built this before we stepped foot onto them. Four of us did.

One lone camel and rider in the middle of the open desert chasing the history of the Silk Road like the phantom of the past alone alone alone alone alone alone (no shower for 5 days; don’t even wanna talk about the toilet- the horror!!)

I'll let this one speak for itself...

A bike ride around Lijiang proved there are sites to be seen just about everywhere.

An early morning hike in the clouds.

Ironically, my last morning in Beijing and my first clear sky.

Here, Northwest Beijing.