First Week in Beijing

I made it to Beijing! After a very long day of travel, with one 13 hour flight, followed by a 4 hour flight, and then an hour long van ride, we arrived at our apartments on Saturday night. The apartment complex is brand new, and our rooms were beautiful and very modern looking, besides the squat style toilet in the bathroom, I’m not sure I’ll every quite get used to those.

The first week in Beijing was completely packed with activities. The day after we arrived, we took a trip to the Forbidden City. Although the Forbidden City was beautiful, it was incredibly hot outside, a little too much for any of us to handle on the first day. After a few hours of walking around in the sun we were too exhausted to go on, and ended up sitting on benches in the shade until our van showed up. We were then taken out to dinner at a pretty fancy restaurant, and served about 20 traditional Chinese dishes. After dinner we headed over to Tiananmen Square to watch a flag lowering ceremony that takes place at sunset every day. Still tired from our long day, most of us ended up sitting in the middle of Tiananmen Square to watch the ceremony.

On weekdays we’ve been taking Chinese language and culture courses at Peking University. Even though I feel like I’m picking up some Chinese phrases nobody seems to understand me when I speak to them, and usually end up laughing at me. Liu Nian, our language teacher, actually started crying because she was laughing so hard at all of us attempting to speak Chinese. I think I need more practice with vowel tones. I did manage to order a vegetarian dumpling in the grocery store the other day, which made me very proud.

Last Saturday felt like a race to see how much of Beijing we could cover in one day. We started off the day by going to a Lama temple, which was beautiful. There were way too many buildings to see at one time, I'm not sure we even got through half of them. One of the buildings was built around the most massive statue I have ever seen, a giant Buddha about 100 feet high. After that we went to a Confucius temple, and a Confucius study area which both looked exactly the same as the Lama temple to me, except with giant turtle statues instead of a giant Buddha. We then took a carriage ride tour of the area around a beautiful lake. The carriage ride felt a little awkward though because instead of a horse carrying the carriage, a little Chinese man hauled the carriage around. He also sang to us, and told us little stories in Chinese, which I thought was really cute even though I didn't understand a word of it.

Right before dinner we walked to the top of a drum tower, with terrifyingly steep stairs leading up to it. The view from the top of the tower was amazing, I could see all of Beijing, or at least as much as I could before the city disappeared into the smog. We stayed at the tower for about a half hour, and ended up seeing a traditional Chinese drum performance. After the drum tower we headed to dinner at Laoshe Teahouse, where we ate dinner on the second floor, with a view of the stage where musicians were playing. After dinner tea was served with a lot of traditional Chinese desserts, while we watched a series of bizarre, but amazing, performances. The first performance was an orchestra with the main "instrument" being a man with a ridiculously high pitched voice. There were also kung fu men, a magician, and some pretty funny skits. The most incredible performer though, was a woman who juggled really strange objects, like tables and huge vases, with her feet. At one point she even managed to juggle a pole with people sitting at each end, using only her feet.

On Sunday we took a trip to the Great Wall, which was about 2 hours away from Beijing. Even though we took cable cars up most of the mountain, the wall was still an intense trek; at some points I was actually afraid I might fall off the wall. I made the mistake of trying to walk along the Great Wall in flip flops, which made the treacherous hike even harder. Luckily we went back down the wall for lunch, where I was able to pick up the sneakers that I had left in the van. We headed back up a different part of the wall, which was less frightening, but much more physically demanding.