Day 11

Day 11,
originally uploaded by printsmart102.

Today, Sunday, we went to the great wall. Yesterday, saturday, we went to WangFuJing. Also, we saw our migrant friends again ( whom we originally met at Chaoyang park.) That was the weekend in brief. Also this week, we had our first week of classes and moved from Boya, a 4-star hotel, to the Beijing Seniors Activity center, a hotel across the street with fewer amenities. Not that I'm complaining. A hotel is still far from most of the real beijing anyway. The schedule, at this point, is really packed and we don't have much down time, s so we don't stay at the hotel very often anyway.

On saturday morning, we visited the migrant high school where the students we met last week go to school. They learn vocational skills like mechanics, and stuff. Anyway, we did teambuliding and I made new friends. It' would've been nice if they had given us more time just to chat, because I made a lot more friends and learned a lot more about these people just from talking.

That afternoon, we visited a park not far from there. We had a great lunch at a restaurant and then explored the park. It turns out the park is in the middle of the russiatown of Beijing- bizzarely, more signs i couldn't read everywhere, but this time, in Russian. The first picture (001) is from a big courtyard in that park that I was standing in the middle of.

Later that day we went to WangFuJing, a huge commercial district like Times swuare. pictures 002 and 003 are from there. At one point (002) a huge crowd gathered to watch a friend of mine rap - over 100 people. He's good with the rhymes, but not that good. People were just excited to see americans. Then they took our picture (you can see people with cameras.) We also went to the night market and tried crazy kinds of food - squid, octopus, sheep, snake. Plus weird anatomy. I also bought a bunch of cool stuff at the market center of wangfujing, where you can change prices by walking away.

Today (sunday) we went to the great wall. It's a really tough climb. To get up, there are over 1000 stairs just to get up to the wall, before you evevn got onto the wall. Then, there are hundreds more steps to get to tower 20 (the highest tower that it's safe to go onto.) I took pictures there, too. After going to tower 20 and feeling clouds flowing past my head, i ran almost all the way downhill (on the wall) to tower 6 - about 2-3 miles. From there I rode a toboggan kind of sled down a metal flume to the bottom of the mountain. There's so much more to say about these things, but not enough time. I took lots of pictures. Clearly, 004 is from the great wall.

That's all I have time for now. Check later for more on this life.