July 28 9:30pm China time, 8:30am US. One thing I think about as we're driving around the streets of China, is how big the world is but how small it is at the same time. Dreaming about a place you want to visit is much different than actually being there in person. When you dream about it, it's surreal and almost imaginary. When you're there however, you're completely immersed in the culture of other human beings who are both so same and so different. I'm a people watcher, so I'm completely enthralled with watching these people of China and how they look, talk, dress, act, how they look at us, how their kids look, act and dress. While out and about in Tiananmen Square, the summer palace, the Olympic campus from 2008, and everywhere else we went today, we were as much of a sight to see for these domestic tourists as the historic areas. I lost track of how many time we took pictures with different people and how many times they tried to be a little less obvious and just take pictures of us like that's what we were there for. We were even followed for a while.
Today we started at Tiananmen square. It's Friday here so the domestic tourism rate was high. LiLi our guide, says that many of the people are from all over China. That coming to Beijing is similar to them as NYC or Washington DC for us. It's the big city and if the people are from a rural area, that they may have never seen anyone who was not Chinese before. We were asked to take pictures with people a lot and we were constantly pointed and stared at. I couldn't decide if I felt more like a celebrity or an exotic zoo animal.
We saw way more of the Forbidden City than what we did when I was here before. LiLi told us all about the history and the emperors and the dynasty's. She is very knowledgeable about Chinese history. After that we drove to the Birds nest and whole campus area where the Olympics were held. By that time, is was so hot and tired that it was difficult to enjoy. We ate lunch after that at a hotel restaurant that was very good. We had meat (hopefully chicken), sticky rice, fried fish, water spinach, sweet egg drop soup, corn, jasmine tea, and watermelon for desert. We went to the summer palace after lunch which is so much bigger than I thought. It is really a very long stretch of land along the side of the lake that is shaped like a dragon. It was interesting to see all the hundreds of families visiting the summer palace who looked like they spend the day there. There were people sitting and relaxing along the lake and on the palaces. When we finally reached the end, we took a dragon boat back to the entrance where our driver picked us up and we went to the hotel where the Chinese Opera show was at. We had 2 hours to kill before the show started so we ate dinner there and did some shopping in the big souvenir store. I had a very hard time staying awake during the show but the parts that I saw where pretty cool. They incorporated Kung Fu and kind of a dance into the show. We said goodnight to LiLi after the show and the driver took us back to the hotel. We are all dead tired. We'll get up at 6:30am to eat before LiLi meets us at 8 to make the trip to the Great Wall. Good night from Beijing!
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