Monday, May 21, 2007

okay, day 2 - saturday

i have to get y'all caught up!

the first day, friday, was gorgeous. it was windy, which i guess kept the smoggy pollution out of the city. our prof said it was rare to see such gorgeous blue skies. saturday was pretty, too, but also hotter.

pretty much all of the dogs i've seen in china are tiny and adorable.

this day we had a lecture and then we went to the beijing development museum, which, when you think about it, is an unusual idea for a museum. it had lots of 3-d maps of beijing at various points in time. the one below was at the entrance. i think it was of beijing in the old days, but i'm not sure about that. i think the forbidden city is the little tiny, tiny square in the center - the tiniest one. you can also see the great wall snaking around the mountains around beijing.

this is a gigantic wall-mounted map of 1949 beijing. all the golden roofs are in the forbidden city. tiananmen square is just south of/below that, and you can see the hill i took pictures from on friday just above that.

then there was a gigantic map of the beijing of today, including buildings that haven't been built yet. it was HUGE. the big patch of green toward the right is the temple of heaven where the emperor used to go every year to pray for good weather, etc.

here it is from a slightly different angle and better lighting. the forbidden city again has golden roofs, and tiananmen square is just south of/below it. mao's mausoleum is the rectangle surrounded by square bushes/grass. the bubble to the left of tiananmen square is the new opera house. our hotel i believe is also in this picture. we are a couple blocks east of the forbidden city. the olympic sites are on the same north/south axis as tiananmen square/the forbidden city. they are up where the map goes into shadow. i'd have to zoom in to check, but i think the round thing just below the shadow along that axis is the "bird's nest" stadium that is the main olympic venue.

below is i think part of the financial district of the city? anyway, it's more businessy with more skyscrapers. that sweet looking one is for cctv - chinese television. i'm hoping to get to see that one before we leave. if i remember right, this is in the northeast part of the city. maybe northwest. anyway...


here are the two most striking olympic sites. the bird's nest is the stadium, and the square bubble thing next to it is the aquatics center.


after the beijing development museum, we went to a restaurant that cooked peking duck. there is construction seriously all over beijing. even on the street of our hotel. the government is making the people clean up their houses at their own expense. this was on the way to the restaurant.


at all of the restaurants we've visited so far, food is served family style. a lot of the restaurants have lazy susans on every table to make serving easier. here's our food from saturday night. i couldn't possibly begin to describe all the dishes, mostly because i don't remember exactly waht they were. but the red and white dotted one at the bottom is lotus, and the pale dish at the far right is duck liver. i didn't have the duck liver, but the lotus was good.


and the below pic shows a deboned duck f00t. yes, i ate it, and yes, it wasn't without a lot of gagging.

i think after i got home from the restaurant, i fell asleep right away. i've gotten a lot of sleep the past two nights - far more than 8 hours - because i've been really tired at 6/7 pm. i'm not letting myself fall asleep tonight - i just miss too much!

anyway, what else? um, i think i forgot to mention that at the forbidden city there were a lot of tourists, but also a lot of chinese tourists. many of them probably had never seen a white person before in person, so i got asked a couple times to pose in pictures with people. then again, it might have just been the red hair and height that fascinated people. there are also a lot of poor people who try to get you to buy stuff. europe is like that, too, but in china, you feel safer about people possibly pick-pocketing your stuff. also, as if you didn't already know, everything is dirt cheap. we were amazed that we had a huge meal of dumplings - potstickers - and it cost about 2.20 in US dollars each.

there's a lot i could talk about regarding the topic of the class - sports and globalization and the olympics in china - but that'll have to wait. also, the people in the class are awesome, as are my professors.

2 comments:

lightning said...

doggies! :) sounds like the trip is amazing so far.

Magnolia said...

Yay, you got to try Peking Duck! Wasn't it yummy? I can't believe you ate the foot, though...you're a brave soul.