China

TOP 5 PLACES TO VISIT IN CHINA

1. Donghuamen Night Market: This is the place for food if you’re a tourist in China: No food is off limits here. You can find fried scorpions on a stick (and that’s exactly what Stefan and Jarrah eat!), fried grasshoppers on a stick, fried snake wrapped around a stick . . . basically, if it’s a gross animal that you wouldn’t consider eating, they put it on a stick!

2. Forbidden City: Mack, Jarrah, and Stefan’s destination in China. Today, anyone can enter the Forbidden City, full of museums and palaces with nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine rooms. But, back in the day, the city was forbidden to anyone but eunuchs. (Look it up—boys, make sure you’re sitting down first.)

3. Great Wall of China: Another hot tourist destination in China. Mack, Jarrah, Stefan, and Xiao escape from another Skirrit attack by swimming across a river and taking a "boat" to a dock underneath the Great Wall. Back in the days when it was all still standing, the Great Wall ran more than five thousand miles. Today, it’s a beautiful site of curving stone wall intersected by steep, green, triangular mountains; it sort of looks like a bunch of dragons.

4. Long Xiang: The Dragon Home, not seen by humans for many years . . . oh yeah, that’s right. You can’t see this place unless you’re with the Magnificent Twelve. Sorry!

5. Terracotta Army: If Mack, Jarrah, Stefan, and Xiao had more time to explore all that China has to offer instead of tracking down the Pale Queen and avoiding various terrifying creatures, they could have taken a short flight from Beijing to Xi’an and seen the Terracotta Army, a collection of more than 8,000 sculptures depicting the armies for the first emperor of China. These statues are REALLY old but weren’t discovered until the 1970s—pretty cool!