Temple of Heaven Pictures

When you enter through the east gate (as we did) you begin by walking down a tree-lined pathway to the inner temples. It's like another world as soon as you walk inside.

Me and Kristen right before walking into the inner temple area. An Asian man in a cowboy hat escorting a Panamanian took this picture.

I'm not entirely sure what this building was used for, but it now houses a convenience store that sells cold drinks and popsicles to hot tourists.

This is the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. You can tell it is a prayer hall by the circular design on top of the square base (although you can't tell it is a square base from this picture). You've probably seen this building before on Chinese tourist literature.

This is a closer view of the Hall so you can see how it is decorated. The inside is roped off, so you have to fight all of the other tourists for a good spot to take pictures of the interior.

These are two pictures of the park surrounding the temples. It looks like nothing else I have seen in Beijing. I have heard that there are some other parks in the city, so perhaps I will look for them next weekend.

Forbidden City Pictures

There is a river running around the Forbidden City as well as through the southern portion of it. You have to cross bridges to get into the city as well as between the southern gate and the rest of the city. Often the bridges come in sets of five for the five pillars of Confuscianism (I think).

The Forbidden City is like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco in that it is eternally undergoing restoration. There is a team of workers who, by the time they make the full circle around the city, have to start back at the beginning because it's time for another restoration. While they work on the temples, they cover them with this semi-transparent board, and they also print a vague picture of what the temple looks like on the outside so you can kind of tell what should be there. I was reminded of the first time I saw the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: it was under construction and so was covered in some sort of board, but the board had a picture of the gate printed on it with the gate columns covered in soccer socks!

A picture of some of the thousands of tourists there the same day. I have never seen so many umbrellas in one place in my life, although they really are everyone in Beijing. Pale skin is prized in China, so many people walk around with umbrellas all the time to keep the sun away from their skin.

Most of the temples are built in this style. The building in the corner has a double roof, which means it was very important.

This is Kristen and me on the other side of the temples shown in the previous picture. We had a hard time finding someone who could understand that we wanted our picture taken with a certain temple in the background. It took several tries before we got the picture that we wanted!

This pathway is still blocked off to tourists. It was only allowed to be walked on by the royal emperor.

The emperor would walk down that pathway from this temple to the next one for important ceremonies.

You can see here the large amount of open space, and this was one of the smaller sections. There were much bigger squares of empty space in front of the more important temples.

These next pictures are from the Imperial Gardens in the north end of the Forbidden City. The buildings are much closer together, and there is no empty space; there are trees (like the one above) and rocks and flowers. It was beautiful.

I am not entirely sure what this building was used for, but the inside was an ornate open space with a tiered circular ceiling. The Chinese believed that Heaven was round, so many of the prayer rooms and buildings are circular on a square base (square for Earth).

This is just a cool statue in the gardens.

Weekends in Beijing

It’s been about two weeks since my last post, and it has been the most relaxing two weeks of the entire trip.  After our weekend in Shanghai, we had to present our projects and take our final for 3104 (Supply Chain Modeling: Warehousing and Manufacturing), but then the class was over.  That class was incredibly time consuming and difficult, so we were all happy to be done.  Now, we’re taking 3103 (Supply Chain Modeling: Logistics), and while the material is still challenging, none of us feel as stressed out.  We have more time to relax and enjoy being in Beijing.  Because we had 3104 first, many people really did not like Beijing or living in China, but now that we have a change to breathe and enjoy it, a lot of people are much happier.

The weekend after the final, I decided to stay in Beijing.  I was still sick (because I hadn’t had time to slow down and heal), so I didn’t feel up to traveling.  Almost everyone else went to Shanghai, but the people who had gone to Shanghai the weekend before stayed in Beijing with me.  We slept in every morning (although I still woke up by 9.30 thanks to the bright sun), didn’t rush around, and didn’t make plans ahead of time.  We discovered some good restaurants and enjoyed having different kinds of cuisine, not just Asian food or fast food for every meal.  We did a lot of shopping, and most of us got our entire list of gifts out of the way.  I also got the chance to see the new Superman movie in an international movie theater (it was in English).  I have now seen movies in the USA, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, and China!  Now, if I was in the USA, this would probably be an incredibly boring weekend, but after everything I have been doing and how sick I was, the weekend was perfect.  I even woke up on Monday morning without being sick!

The whole next week was just about as relaxing.  Our class wasn’t too stressful, so we got to explore more of Beijing in the evenings.  We had a big celebration on Tuesday.  Lane and Molin had both had birthdays on the previous Saturday (22 and 20, respectively), and Tuesday was Kevin’s 21st birthday, so we combined them all into one and had a big party on Tuesday night.  Almost the entire group (I think only about 3 students didn’t come, and even professor Sokol came with us) went to Steak and Eggs, a ‘North American Diner’ we had discovered in the embassy district.  This restaurant is owned by a Canadian who, through a bizarre set of circumstances involving SARS and travel restrictions, found himself living in Beijing without good cheap American food.  All of the meals are very cheap, and even the drinks are only 15RMB (less than US$2).  Kevin loved the food, and drinks that cheap are perfect for a 21st birthday, so we spent a lot of time there.  We also ordered three custom-made cakes (chocolate, strawberry, and coconut) for each of the birthday kids.  After dinner, some of us continued the party in the bar district and spent some time bar-hopping.  Needless to say, Lane was the only birthday kid who made it to class on time.  Molin made it to the afternoon class, and Kevin was in bed all day.  He came back to class the next day to take the exam!

Now, we’re on to this weekend.  I am still in Beijing (I don’t have more outside-of-Beijing travel plans for China) and really enjoying it.  Beijing is so big that it takes a long time to explore all of the districts.  There were only five of us who stayed here for the weekend, so we didn’t have to deal with a lot of people wanting to do different things.  On Thursday evening we explored the restaurants near the university and ended up at another hotpot restaurant.  We liked this one better because we each got our own pot of boiling water (so we didn’t have to chase our meat around and get caught up in other people’s chopsticks), and we also ordered dumplings and vegetables, not just raw meat.  The dumplings were the most complicated to cook.  You had to get the timing just right so that they were in long enough to cook, but if they were in too long the pasta would get too soft and fall apart, dumping all of the fillings into your pot of water.  They were also very slippery, making it difficult to remove them from the pot with chopsticks.  

Friday we got up earlier than we had the last weekend, went back to Steak and Eggs for brunch (we like how cheap it is for such good food!), and then wandered over to the Silk Market to finish up our shopping.  Kristen had to buy a suitcase and pick up the clothes she had had made (a suit and four button-ups) as well as do her second fitting for her silk dress.  I had a cashmere coat made as well as two button-ups because Kristen’s fit so well.  The Silk Market doesn’t just have clothes and silks, so we also got a lot of things on our lists taken care of.  That night we ended up back at Mexican food for dinner.  It’s nothing like the Mexican that we get back in the states (especially in Dalton!), but it’s fairly good for Mexican food in China.

On Saturday, Kristen and I had had enough shopping and wanted to do more cultural and sightseeing things around town.  She won’t be here next weekend, our last weekend in Beijing, so she wanted to make sure she saw these things.  We ended up being on our own because the other people wanted to sleep all day, but we had a good day on our own.  It was one of the most gorgeous days we have had in Beijing so far.  No clouds, no smog, bright sun, good breeze, etc.  We started with going through the Forbidden City.  The Chinese authorities refer to it as the ‘Palace Museum,’ but it is known as the Forbidden City because no commoner was allowed inside for over 500 years.  It was really cool.  We began at the north gate and walked through to the south gate.  When we first walked in, we were reminded of the Grand Palace in Bangkok.  The architecture was really ornate, and the gardens were very oriental (obviously).  After we made it through the gardens, however, the buildings and temples were built much farther apart, and there were large expanses of empty space.  For example, a raised bridge would connect two temples, and the edge of the square would be lined with other buildings with porches, but everything in the middle was open space.  After we left the Forbidden City and were facing Tiananmen Square once more, we realized that it wasn’t unexpected to encounter such large expanses of open space in China (as Tiananmen Square is the largest open square in the world).

After the Forbidden City, we walked back over to Wangfujing to eat lunch and do a little bit of shopping before going to the Temple of Heaven Park.  We weren’t very hungry, so we ducked into a KFC to grab a quick bite, but it was so busy that we couldn’t find any place to sit down!  This was the largest KFC I have ever been to, and at 2pm it was so crowded that two people couldn’t find a place to sit.  It was crazy!  After lunch, we walked over to the biggest bookstore in Beijing so Kristen could buy new books for the plane home, and I bought a National Geographic with a cover story about panda bears.  They are so cute!  I am going to miss panda bears when I return to the USA.  And watermelon with every meal.  Watermelon is very popular in China in the summer.  Almost every restaurant serves it as dessert after your meal, and all of the student cafeterias sell slices of watermelon at meals.  It’s delicious!

After leaving the bookstore, Kristen and I caught the sketchiest cab ever to the Temple of Heaven Park.  It seemed like a registered cab because it looked like other cabs and had a sign and a meter, but it was definitely an illegal one.  Unfortunately for us, we didn’t notice that the meter was three times as high as it should be until we got almost all the way to the Temple of Heaven, and the taxi driver wouldn’t let us go without paying the full amount.  That was very unfortunate for us, and we were not happy with taxis for awhile.  We were OK, though, after getting in the park because it was so beautiful.  This park is a lot like Central Park in NYC in that you can completely forget that you are in the middle of a big city.  It was hectares and hectares of trees and grass and greenery.  I would not have believed Beijing capable of producing something so green in the middle of the city if I hadn’t been here myself.  The park is huge, so we didn’t see all of the alters, but we did see the crowning glory of it all, the alter that is pictured on all of the postcards, and that is all we really wanted to see anyways.  We enjoyed wandering around the park, especially because there were groups of Chinese choral groups and musicians practicing around the gardens.  It was very relaxing.

The pearl market is right next to this park, so after leaving we walked back over to pick up a few more things before meeting the boys for dinner.  We went back to Annie’s, a good Italian place we had been with Professor Zhou after our 3104 final.  Everyone had food they enjoyed, and I had the best arrabbiata sauce I have had in China.  We had good food and good wine and then came back to the university to watch some of our new DVDs.  What a good day!

Now, it is Sunday.  It rained this morning and is still very overcast, so our plans for going to the Summer Palace are shot.  We are all taking care of things around here, like catching up on emails and schoolwork, before potentially going to a Chinese acrobatics show tonight.  Apparently they have 15 Chinese riding one bicycle, so it should be interesting.  I’ll let you know.

Shanghai

Last weekend eight of us traveled to Shanghai.  Georgia Tech has a summer program in Shanghai, and we arranged our accommodations to be in the same building as the other Techies.  We all had some friends on the trip, and it was exciting to see them in such a foreign setting.

Rather than fly to Shanghai from Beijing, we took an overnight train.  We were advised by everyone who had ever been to China to spend the extra yuan to get the ‘soft sleeper,’ (first class) and it is such a good thing that we did.  There were four beds per compartment, perfect for our numbers.  The beds were a lot more comfortable than what we are used to in our dorms, and they even brought around a small meal like on an airplane.  We played cards for a long time before climbing into bed, but we also stayed awake a long time just talking to each other.  With our rough class, we hadn’t had much time to relax, so it was nice just to hang out and lay around.

We arrived in Shanghai at roughly 7am Friday morning and set about finding our hotel.  Carlanna went on the Shanghai program last summer, so she knew her way around pretty well.  We got to the hotel with no major incidents.  We had trouble checking in because it was so early in the morning (our rooms weren’t ready), but we finally got one of the three, so we all piled in to begin the shower process.  We split up, some people going to breakfast and some staying behind to shower, and by the time everyone was done, the rest of our rooms were ready.  Everyone got settled in, and then we headed out to explore our second Chinese town.

Shanghai is known as the New York City of China.  It is a wealthy city with a lot of business, and it is known for its shopping and nightlife.  There aren’t too many sightseeing activities in Shanghai; you go to Shanghai to shop, eat, and drink!  And boy, can you shop, eat, and drink!  We started off our afternoon with lunch at a kebab shop, just like the kind I used to eat in New Zealand, before wandering around all of Carlanna’s old shopping haunts.  She was amazed at how different everything was over just the span of one year.  Restaurants had been knocked down; malls had been built, etc.  We were lucky we found as much of what she saw last year as we did!  We had a successful afternoon shopping, especially after we hit the DVD/movie stores.  Some people went fairly crazy with the US$1 DVDs, but we all got a couple.  We tested most of them before purchasing to make sure we were getting a good quality, but Lane didn’t test any of hers and ended up with some funny DVDs.  Her Da Vinci Code was all in Chinese, and the English subtitles were so bad that we went ahead and watched the whole movie just to laugh at them!

After shopping, we came back to the hotel to crash for awhile before heading back out to search for dinner.  Most of us took naps or enjoyed the new DVDs.  After feeling rested, we wandered back out to find some good food.  Carlanna had an idea of where she wanted to go, but then the restaurants had been torn down, so we were on our own.  We walked past a place that was really full, which usually means it is really good, so we got a table in the back.  It was traditional Chinese food, and as we didn’t understand most of what was on the menu, we had the manager help pick the best dishes and wished for the best.  Turns out the manager knew what she was doing!  It was one of the best Chinese food meals I have had in China.  We had fish, pork, chicken, and beef; noodles and rice; and we ended up drinking them out of cold beer!  It was a really good meal.  Because we were a large group of Americans, we also had our own personal wait staff.  There were at least two waiters at all times standing near our table, and the manager was always there if we needed her.

After dinner, we headed out to the bars.  We hadn’t been able to go out to bars in Beijing because we had had so much work, so we were really looking forward to kicking back this weekend.  We arranged to meet some of the Shanghai techies at one of the bars, and off we went.  When we all finally made it to the same bar (there was some trouble with the cab drivers), we realized that the special wasn’t for that night, making it twice as expensive, so we began searching around for a new bar.  We settled on Cloud 9, the über-swanky bar at the top of the Hyatt overlooking the water.  It took awhile to communicate with a cab driver where we wanted to go, but we all finally made it and settled in to enjoy our drinks.  It was an overcast night, so we couldn’t see the famous Shanghai skyline, but we still managed to enjoy the bar.  We met some people from Wales, Ireland, and England and invited them to join us, and it was nice to have new faces in the group.  I was also excited because I got to talk about how amazing New Zealand rugby is with someone who really knew about it!

The next day was devoted to more eating and shopping.  We began the day with an amazing brunch at a world-renowned restaurant.  I had granola with yogurt and fruit as well as French toast and bacon (real bacon).  It was the best breakfast I have had so far in China.  Aside from its good food choices, Shanghai is also known for its amazing fake markets, and I went to Shanghai with the goal of coming home with good Prada (one of my favorites).  A very sad thing happened, though: a few weeks before, the Chinese government had shut down the famous fake market in Shanghai.  People came from all over China to see this market, and it is in practically every guidebook.  No more fake market in Shanghai!  We managed to survive thanks to Ting’s (friend of mine who was in Shanghai) amazing shopping skills, but it was a whole lot harder.  I also didn’t get the chance to track down seawater pearls like I had intended, but I have since settled for freshwater in Beijing.

One thing I have failed to mention is that I was terribly sick throughout this entire weekend.  Zhou’s class had really run me down, and because I was already tired my malaria medicine really hit me hard last week.  I got the full force of the side effects after taking the medicine, and throughout the weekend I had all the symptoms of a sinus infection.  It is a credit to Shanghai’s awesomeness that I found it to be as fabulous as I did even in the rain and being as sick as I was.  I was so sick, in fact, that I couldn’t stay in Shanghai as long as I intended.  I was planning on staying through Sunday night, taking the overnight train home, and going straight to class Monday morning, but I think my body would have gone on strike if I had pushed it that hard.  I ended up taking the train home on Saturday night with Lane and Patrick instead.  We had a random Chinese girl in our car and spent awhile practicing our Chinese with her, but we were all so exhausted that we had climbed in bed by 9.30pm.  I spent the whole next day in bed.  I lay down all day, watching newly acquired movies and seasons of the Gilmore Girls.  I got up once for dinner when Lane encouraged me to go to Subway.  It was exactly what my body needed.  I am still a little sick, but I have my strength back and am no where near as sick as I was then!

Great Wall pictures

There are many, many quotes from travelers who marvel at how the Great Wall of China snakes through the mountains, and they are all completely understandable. You think you understand, but you can't really grasp the idea until you are actually looking at it follow the curves of the mountainside. From what I understand, the area to the left of the wall is China proper and to the right (perhaps in the distance) is Inner Mongolia (the Autonomous Region of Mongolia, if you ask the Chinese).

As I said in my previous post, this section of the wall has a river running through it. At the lowest point, there is a bridge going over the water connecting the two sections of the wall. If you look closely enough, towards the left you can see the dam on the water.

One part of one of the climbs from one of the watchtowers to the next. We did this a lot. This one doesn't have steps right here, it's more of a slope, but you can see how stairs would be trecherous.

The ladies who were following us around got very nervous when we climbed up on the wall, but don't worry. There was a sort of ledge a couple of meters down behind us.

There was no ledge below me here, however. This is nearing the very top of the section we could climb. I believe we were around Watchtower 7 or so, and there are 12 in total.

This was taken on the opposite corner of the same platform as the picture before. We borrowed the hats from two of the guys in our group.

I took this picture from as far up as we could go. These are watchtowers 13-16. You can see how it is crumbling so much that it makes sense not to allow simple tourists to go climbing on it.

Marianna, me, and Lane. Don't worry, we didn't really jump!

This is the whole group who climbed up Simatai that day (plus Karinna, she got cut off on the right side). Woot woot!

Tiananmen Square and the Great Wall

Last Friday morning we had an organized ‘field trip’ to Tiananmen Square as part of our history class (from Singapore). The only thing that we did officially as a group was to file through Mao’s Mausoleum. When he died in 1976, his body was embalmed and placed on display in his newly-built mausoleum. It is smack dab in the middle of Tiananmen Square, the largest paved open space in the world. It was incredible how many people are always there to file past his body. We weren’t allowed to bring in any bags, cameras, etc, so Professor Zhou and our graduate assistant Chien-Hung stayed outside to hold everything. We were fairly shoved into double-file lines to snake our way across the square before entering the mausoleum. On the way in you can jump out of line to purchase a rose to place on Mao’s shrine directly inside the entrance (his shrine, not his body; two different things). His body is under glass in the back room. The line splits into two, one to go down each side and the file out the back door.

After the mausoleum, the group split up to do our separate activities. Tiananmen Square has a lot of famous buildings around it, such as the Forbidden City, the Great Hall of the People, and the Monument to the People’s Heroes, so most of us took a stroll across the square before heading off in our different directions. I ended up going shopping with Marianna and Chao (a Tsinghua student in our class) for knick-knacks and more chopsticks before getting lunch. We had an amazing lunch. Everyone says that if you come to Beijing, you have to have peking duck, and they are correct. We went to a restaurant that is famous for their duck, the Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant. This was by far the nicest place I have been in Asia. We arrived right after noon, and we were the first customers in the restaurant. Everyone jumped to attention as soon as we walked in. We were ushered to a table right in the middle of the restaurant and then six different waiters swarmed us, trying to pull out our chairs, place napkins across our laps, and set up our utensils. We ordered a roast (peking) duck, which came with soup, sauce, onions and other seasonings, and ‘pancakes,’ as well as duck-filled spring rolls. They brought the duck to our table and carved it in front of us! The way to eat duck in Beijing is to hold your pancake (made of a thin bread, like the kind used in dumplings) flat in your hand, spread several pieces of duck and onions inside, fold it up into a square, and dip it in the sauce. We invented new ways of making the pancakes, and it was delicious. What a good meal!

After lunch, we wandered back to Tiananmen Square to go to the National Museum. They had many different exhibits, everything from Chinese culture to art to Incan artifacts. In the same complex is a museum of the Chinese Communist Party and Museum of the Chinese Revolution. My guidebook says that they were closed from 1966 to 1978 ‘so that history could be revived in light of recent events.’ Apparently that still happens today!

By the time we were done with the museum, we didn’t have time to do either the Forbidden City or the Temple of Heaven, both of which should take about half a day, so we ended up just coming back to Tsinghua. It was almost 6.30 by the time we got home, so we went right to dinner. We relaxed that night because we had a big day the next day.

Earlier in the week we had made arrangements for our entire group plus some of the NUS and Tsinghua students to venture out to see the Great Wall of China. After asking our friends who had done this program before and our professor, we decided to make the long drive (roughly four hours) out to the Simatai section. There are several sections of the Great Wall around Beijing, but the ones closer to the city are more touristed and artificial (so we hear). I am very happy that we made the long drive out to Simatai because we saw almost no tourists (as compared to the wall-to-wall tourists that supposedly visit the closer sections in the summer months).

Simatai was built during the Ming dynasty. We were able to climb to 12 of the 16 watchtowers; the remaining four are crumbling so terribly that tourists are not allowed to attempt them without special permission. Some of the staircases (and I use the term ‘staircases’ very loosely) between watchtowers are at 70 degree inclines; thankfully, so were the staircases we climbed in Cambodia, so we’d had practice! The views were absolutely spectacular. We were in the middle of no where with the most brilliant day we’ve had the entire time we’ve been in China. There was just a smattering of clouds and a light breeze, which, considering the strong sun and the fact that we’re climbing 70 degree staircases, felt very good at the top. There is a river running along the mountains ending in a dam, and the rolling mountains meeting the water was so gorgeous that it reminded me of New Zealand. I’ve been told that the air was thinner at the top, but I didn’t notice it as it was the cleanest air I have experienced since being in China.

One of the craziest parts of the Great Wall is the amount of hawkers who follow you around. I don’t know if it is like this on the other sections, but I was amused by it at Simatai. It works like this: a lady will attach herself to your side, fanning you the whole way up the wall, helping you up and down precarious ledges, taking group and single pictures for you, and generally being a companion until you get to the top, at which point she wants you to buy everything that she has. They’re really very nice, and I had fun joking around with a lady who attached herself to my group. I bought a fan from her for twice what I should have paid for it, but I told her I knew that I was overpaying and it was only because I had so much fun with her climbing up the wall. (By overpay twice as much, I mean I paid 20 yuan instead of 10 yuan. That’s US$2.5 instead of US$1.25.) We had a large group walking up the wall, so she was one of several ladies walking with us, and as a group they were just as amused with us as we were with them! We tended to take crazy pictures, and in between watchtowers they helped to teach us more Chinese. It was a good situation and a great day.

Oh, one other thing about the wall. Because this section is so precarious, there is a cable car that runs up and down for those who want to avoid broken ankles and such. Most of our group took the cable car on the way down, but several of us had other plans. On the way up, we had passed a flying fox (zip line) that crossed the water down to the other side. We couldn’t not do the zip line, so we walked back down the wall (it only took about 10 minutes) and found the entrance. It wasn’t much more than the cable car (only about 5 yuan),and after the flying fox we got to ride in a boat down the river to the carpark (at which point we bargained with more hawkers for more drinks and souvenirs). We had already all purchased popsicles at the top of the Wall, but after our strenuous day we all needed more drinks.

Even though we were all exhausted after that day, we found the energy to take showers and go out to the International Beer Garden to watch the England v Portugal game. There were a lot more foreigners than I expected, and there was an especial majority of English fans. There were so many people that we had to split into shifts to get dinner in order to save our chairs and tables! We at the at budget Italian restaurant that is very close to campus that evening. We’re all beginning to get a little tired of ‘real’ Asian food, even the die hard Asian food fanatics, so every once in awhile some Western cuisine is necessary.

The next day was filled with schoolwork and shopping along with a nicer dinner. We are heading to Shanghai this weekend and plan to do some major shopping for fake purses and real pearls, but in order to make a good comparison we needed to first discover what Beijing had to offer. So, we headed to the official pearl market that also has floors of electronics, clothes, shoes, toys, fake jewelry, and purses. We had done a lot of research to make sure we didn’t get scammed buying pearls, so we knew the reputable places to look in this market. Not too many people purchased anything as this was just an investigation (purchasing will come after the trip to Shanghai), but we didn’t come away empty handed! All of us bought at least one purse, and Carlanna even picked up a fake iPod Nano. This is definitely a market we will be returning to. We’re learning to be hard bargainers, and while some of us are better than others, we’re all pretty good at sticking to what we want to pay. When Marianna was bargaining for her purse and the lady wouldn’t drop her price, we walked away. We made it halfway down the aisle (and these are LONG aisles) with the lady desperately calling prices after us before she dropped down to the one that we wanted. When Marianna went back to retrieve her purchase, the lady said something to the effect of, ‘You not American! You not American! You Pakistani the way you bargain!’ It was pretty funny.

After the market we met up with the Shanghai people. Georgia Tech runs two summer programs in China, the one that I am on and one that only goes to Shanghai. Several of the Shanghai students were in Beijing this weekend, so we took a taxi to their hotel to have dinner with them. It was nice seeing people from back home (as well as new people) again. We couldn’t stay out with them because we have so much schoolwork to do. It’s really piling on right now. For this class, which is 2.5 weeks long (Mon-Thurs, Mon-Thurs, and a final on Wed) we have two midterms, several homeworks, three projects (two of which have papers, one of which has a presentation), and a final. We’ve already made it through one Mon-Thurs, one Monday, and one midterm, which means we have many more to go with not much time left. We have Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday day (because we are leaving Thursday night for Shanghai), Monday, and Tuesday to complete the three projects (two papers, one presentation), one midterm, homeworks, and the final. Wish us luck not collapsing!