The Forbidden City

On Friday, about 30 of us took a day trip to Tian'anmen and the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is beyond massive -- from entrance to exit it took over 30 minutes to traverse it. Instead of wasting my metaphorical breath, I'll let some pictures do the talking. (click them to zoom in)

The architecture is so ornately detailed

The Imperial Garden

The ladies love us.

(when we offered to take a picture with them, it was like Christmas came early)

a panorama of one third of the Forbidden City.

the sheer size of it is just baffling.

We spent about 5 hours here, and after we couldn't take another step, we forced ourselves to go to the famous Silk Market. The Silk Market is a 7-story indoor market, with approximately 400 little shops, selling everything from knock-off purses and clothing to CDs, DVDs, and electronics. One guy even tried to bargain an iPad down to $150, lol. I haggled a cell phone down to about 250 RMB ($37), but I couldn't get it lower, so I had to hold off on buying one until today. I ended up buying one for about $30 USD.

Which brings me to Sunday. My roommate arrived, and he's pretty awesome. His name is 何洋 (He2 Yang2), and his English is essentially non-existent, which is good for me because I'm not looking to be an English teacher. Since he lives in Beijing, he showed me some great places and we went out for lunch. I spent a good 15 minutes trying to explain the difference between what America calls football and what everyone else calls football. 

After some pointless program activities, we had a traditional Chinese BBQ, which was completely different from the Chinese BBQs in America. There was about 30 different kinds of snacks (北京风味的小吃), and they were crazy delicious. The main courses were 4 different kabobs, a type of soup, and rice. The food display consumed about 25 standard-size dinner tables, so... yeah. It was insane. 

I went off to memorize my 65 words for the day (shittttttt), and then we went to what you might call a public party at this park. It was in this cemented space about half the size of Tian'anmen (huge), and there were tons of little kids rollerblading (apparently that's very popular here), older Chinese people doing country-western square dancing (lol), middle-aged people line dancing, and then vendors everywhere selling food and a wide-variety of light-up toys. My first thought was that it was some holiday celebration, but my roommate informed me that they do it every night. So cool. No one does stuff like that in the U.S....

Next time, my first day of class .....(I got pwned HARD)....