Beijing!

Hello everybody,

Its Monday again.  So that means another blog post! Yay! And this week was filled with many adventures, most notably, a trip to Beijing.  The capital of China.  To begin with a recap from last week, the Tai Chi thing I was supposed to go to didn't happen.  The people I was going with never showed up, so I decided to go for a 2.5 mile run instead, so the entire evening wasn't wasted.  Also, according to the lady working the office here, the calligraphy class doesn't start until after our holiday week (Oct. 1st  to the 7th.).  So as soon as that gets going, if it still does, I'll let you know how it goes.

Other than those two things, the biggest point of my week was our trip to Beijing, from last Thursday to Saturday.  After a five hour bus ride, we arrived in the capital city.  And, wonderfully, we could see clearly down the streets we were driving on.  In Shi Jiazhuang, the smog is so bad that we can't even see all of campus from our sixth story window.  Beijing is not so, which was literally a breath of fresh air.  After a quick lunch, we went to Tienanmen Square, the largest central square in China.

Right next to the square is the Forbidden City, which we found actually used to be the largest living quarters for the emperor of China. Almost 600 meters long, the "city"/palace had almost 90 buildings, if I remember the tour guide correctly.

After our first packed afternoon, we went to the Phoenix Suyuan hotel for the night.  The next morning, after a normal breakfast consisting of eggs, french toast, and buttered toast, we traveled to easily my favorite of the sites, the Great Wall.  Now, the Great Wall is a lot more daunting than is often advertised on pictures and such.  For starters, the section we visited was mostly stairs.  And not just stairs, but incredibly steep, uneven stairs that climbed almost vertically up the side of a mountain.  I was able to climb to the first outpost on one side of the wall, and then turn around and reach the highest point on the other side.  It felt incredible to be doing that, and it still hasn't really sunk in that I've now walked on something I'd only dreamt of seeing before now.

 Here is the first wall of stairs I had to climb.

In this picture, I made it to the first small outpost, where the wall forks. 

I also reached that red temple you can see on top of the mountain behind me.

After lunch, we visited the summer palace, which didn't impress me nearly as much as the other places we had been.  It was interesting, but nothing like the Great Wall or Tienanmen Square. Again, a quick dinner, and then back to the hotel for evening.  Our final morning in Beijing brought us to the temple of heaven, where the Emperor would pray on the same day ever year for the blessings of heaven on the entire population of China. It was an interesting location to see as our last one of Beijing.

And with that, our tour of Beijing was over. We got back on the bus for the five hour ride back to campus.  I used Sunday to rest after the long trip, and I definitely can't wait for the other trips if they are all going to be like this one.  That's about all I have for this post, too.  I'll keep it going next Monday of course, unless something exciting happens before then. Thanks again to anyone reading this.

Adam