picture mania

Okay, I guess I'd better do this before the pictures pile up too much.

Here is a taste of my weekend, in pictures and some captions.

Last Sunday, we met our language partners--Beida students who will help us get better at Chinese I guess, and who want to get better at English. Everybody wins! Then, they took us all to the Summer Palace, which was a LOT bigger and grander than I expected. This is me and my language partner, Gou Ying.

Cixi's boat (not a real boat)!

A famous long corridor. Forgot what it's called. Probably something like "Long Corridor of Eternal Harmony and Extremely Glorious Peace"

It was SO CROWDED there. But this made me think--the concept of a place being "crowded" is so interesting. It's easy to dehumanize people when you think of them as part of a "crowd," obstacles in your path, inconveniences. But I won't go into that now because then I'd never finish posting these pictures, and that is obviously more important.

CUTE LITTLE KIDS PLAYING! i couldn't resist :]

This is...the next day? I think. My roommate Natalie and I in a cab on our way to Carrefour.


For dinner, we ate at a really nice Yunnan restaurant. Mom, in case you don't recognize it, that green 菜 is the kind you buy at farmer's market sometimes--you know, that kind of fuzzy one with the swirly tendrils? I was excited to find it at this restaurant.

And then a couple of nights later, we ate at this other restaurant which was not as nice and pretty dirty looking, but the food was really good...especially this pineapple rice! My friend Eric took a bite out of the pineapple to prove that it was real...


And this weekend, we went to the Beijing Urban Planning Exhibition. This is a bronze of Beijing.


model of the business district

then we ate lunch at this famous 100 year old peking duck restaurant. they bought WAY too much food for us...

Then we went to Tiananmen Square...and took a picture with Mao's portrait, except whoever took this evidently forgot the purpose of the picture...oh well.

and on to the forbidden city, which did not feel like a palace, because it was too crowded and commercialized. it just felt like a tourist trap.

After we got out of the Forbidden City, we climbed the mountain behind it, which had a pretty nice view of Beijing


But the BEST part of the whole day was definitely when we haggled the price of these amazing photos from 25 to 5 kuai per person (using the classic "that's too expensive. goodbye!" of course) Which honestly, isn't that bad for them, considering they took the photos with our cameras and got lots of publicity what with the six of us dressed like this! heheheheheee

happy royal family

dramatic royal family

awesome royal family.

clearly, i was born to be an empress.

when we came back down, there were all these chinese girls taking pictures like this. except they don't really smile.

and for some reason they never do this!

phew. i should stop doing things so i can stop posting pictures. THIS TAKES FOREVER!

i have blogged far too much today!
goodbye!