Olympic Stadium and Great Wall

On June 2 (Thursday), we had language class in the morning and learned about telling time, dates, etc. Then, for lunch we went to this little restaurant by our apartment, which had really good dumplings :) One thing about the restaurants in China is that you pay for the meal right after you order and there is no tipping. Because of this, the waiters do the minimum they need to not be fired. After lunch, we meet up with about 6 students from Peking University studying sociology to talk about any questions we might have about life in China or any other questions. A couple of interesting things that they brought up were that they have a lot of freedoms but they can't trust anything that is printed in newspapers or online. The other main thing we talked about was college life for them. They said that, on average, they take 11 classes a semester! I think I would die (though it sounded like they had almost no free time.) We ended up getting dinner with them and they took us around campus to give us a brief tour and talk some more. They were all very nice and we ended up sharing contact information at the end of the evening, so hopefully we will keep in touch.
On Friday, we once again had our language class and learned about how to order food in a restaurant (probable a good thing to know how to do!) Then, for lunch, we met our professors who we will be working with for the rest of the semester. For some reason, the professor I was suppose to be with decided she didn't need another person in her lab, so I was placed with a different professor. I'm not sure what I will be doing yet because as soon as lunch was over, my professor had a meeting and had to leave without telling me what types of projects I would be working on. After, we decided to go to the Olympic Park here in Beijing. It was amazing how nice and clean the metro was the closer you got to the Olympic Stadium! We had to walk through this really nice park area with a lot of statues to get to the Olympic buildings.

We got to see the Indoor Events Building (which I believe is where all the track events are held), the Bird's Nest (which we didn't get to go inside because we got there after the closing time), the torch, the Water Cube (which we went inside and discover they built a water-park in part of it...who knew?), and more.

 The entire area was very nice to just walk around. The best part of the time there was when we were taking a picture with this statue of running people and a huge group of people from India called us over so we could all get a picture together!

On Saturday, June 4, we went to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, a part of the Great Wall that is farter away from the city and, therefore, a lot less crowded. The climbed to the top of wall up almost 500 steps of stairs and the view was AMAZING! It was honestly one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

I took us about 2 1/2 hours to walk the open area of the wall (there are a lot of parts of the wall you can't climb because of safety issues because the wall hasn't been well maintained in the non-tourist areas) and the number of people on the wall the farther along we got went down drastically. By the time we got to the top, there were only about 5 other people with us!

After we got back to the city, we all took a well-deserved nap before heading out to dinner. Then, we went to the HouHai area of Beijing for the evening, which contains a small lake, so we were able to rent paddle-boats and talk and relax for a while. We also got some delicious "meat-on-a-stick." It was spicy, but very good!

New Chinese words I have learned:
女 (woman)
男 (man)
北京 (Beijing)
北 (north)
西 (west)