T-10 Days

I am finally back on the radar! Sorry for how long its been, but nothing truly too exciting has been going down. We have reached the "study" part of study abroad. The last couple days have consisted of class then barricading myself into my dorm room to work on my independent research project (due in 8 days). Its also nice to escape the heat, its been 90 - 100 degrees here everyday and since there has been little rain the air pollution is out of control. 

Despite the weather and the work load I have managed to squeeze in a few fun activities. 

I went to the infamous Silk Market which is basically a HUGE indoor mall with stall after stall of jewelry, silk, clothes, fake watches, purses, anything you can imagine. It is completely aimed for foreigners and they are known for giving the most RIDICULOUS prices ever. I went with some friends and we had the best time bargaining with them. We had an advantage speaking Chinese and some of the sellers yelled at us for bargaining too well. It was quite the experience, though I feel bad for the clueless tourists that end up paying over 100rmb for anything. 

I got to check out Beijing's Art District on a lazy Sunday afternoon! It was really cool, all the galleries are free and open to the public and they had an interesting mix of traditional and modern art. AND best of all they had all these cafes with rooftop seating! AND they had coffee, real coffee! It was fabulous :D

Our group got to go see a Chinese Acrobat show, which was amazing of course. I feel like they don't have the same safety standards as in the States. At one point they had stacked 3 huge men on top of each other and were tossing TINY 6 year old girls at them to stack on top/catch and toss back. It was amazing what they could do but slightly terrifying. I heard the act was pretty similar to what they do in Cirque Du Soleio.

I also got to go to a hot spring outside of Beijing with some Chinese friends I met. It was basically a giant indoor water park, but without a lot of slides. They had a huge standard cold pool with swimming lanes and 3 smaller slides. Then they had the hot spring pool, which was actually really cool. They had little geysers and shower head things to spray the spring water on you. It was definitely an interesting experience. I was the only white person there beside my friend AND the best part was we had to wear swimming caps the whole time.

I checked out the Summer Palace as well, which is about 30 minutes walking from my house. It was used by the last dynasty for relaxing and such. I made the mistake of going on a Saturday and there were SO MANY PEOPLE. In fact the Chinese have a saying which describes this perfectly: 人山人海 (rénshānrénhǎi) which in literal translation means people mountain people sea. The sights were super pretty, they have a huge manmade lake which we took a boat ride across and lots of old trees. But way too many people, think the most crowded day at Colonial Williamsburg times 70.

So yeah besides those outings its been all work, speaking of which its about time for me to lock myself into the good old dorm room and work on some research paper!