Visit to the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Sqaure, the Temple of Heaven and more!

Obviously, we've been seeing a ton of stuff here in China and been all over the city! On Tuesday (May 31st), we found this popular place for breakfast...although breakfast isn't at all like breakfast in the US. We all got these steamed-pork-filled dumplings which were really good. Best part: 10 of the dumplings are 4.5 RMB, or only about 70 cents! Everything here is crazy cheap (but I'm not complaining!)

After breakfast we made our way to the Summer Palace, which is on the outskirts of Beijing and use to be the  vacation-spot of choice for the Chinese Emperors. It's basically a lot of buildings in a wooded-park area with a huge lake in the middle. There were a bunch of people exercising in the palace area, playing traditional music, and a ton of people doing what we assume was a Chinese version of the Macarena...not really sure but PJ, Angela, and Han attempted to dance too, which got a lot of attention from the locals!

After lunch, we headed to the Forbidden City (named because back in the day commoners were not allowed in except with special permission from the emperor). It was HUGE and completely surrounded by two huge ways and a moat...which is probably why it was forbidden. The buildings were all really beautiful and the wood work was very detailed and intricate. The only bad thing was that you couldn't go inside any of the buildings (though you could look into a couple which had these ridiculously extravagant chairs for the emperor. The most amazing thing is that all the buildings had special names/meanings (even though they all were very similar).

Then, we went to Tiananman Square, which is at the south gate of the Forbidden City. The portrait of Chairman Mao was much larger than I thought it was going to be and the most interesting thing was the number of cameras in the square! Guess they're trying to prevent another incident like in 1989...

On June 1, we had our first Chinese language class, which covered the sounds that the Chinese letters make, numbers, and basic phrases. I’m also beginning to be able to recognize a few Chinese characters (namely the numbers, 人(people), 日(day or sun) and 月(moon or month). After our class (which lasted all morning), we went to the Temple of Heaven, a huge park that was built around an ancient temple that used to be used for sacrifices to heaven. The temple was beautiful and it was nice to just walk around for a while. Also, the Temple of Heaven seemed to be the place for old people to get together and play cards (and let me tell you, some of those games were intense!). We also met an old guy who played this awesome instrument and was 

extremely happy to play it for us.

After visiting the temple, we went to the Pearl Market, a market area where you can get a lot of cool cheap stuff (like jewelry, souvenirs, clothes, etc.) if you know how to bargain. I ended up getting a couple things for about 15% what the people were originally asking for...score! Finally, for dinner, we went to this place called the Hot Pot, where you order a bunch of meat and vegetables and cook it in a pot of boiling water at your table....very good even though we ordered waaaaay too much food! At least it was still cheap!

Some prices of things in Beijing:

1 trip in the metro to anywhere in the city: 2 RMB = $0.30

A bottle of water from the supermarket: 0.69 RMB = $0.10

I've also learned electricity is often conserved in Beijing....I've been in two restaurants that turn of the power if the place is less than half-full, so they can save money.