Summer Palace

Today we went to the Summer Palace. It is so huge! It makes the Forbidden City look small. If you don't know what the Summer Palace is, check out Wikipedia. It is really impressive and just gorgeous! We took tons of pictures and climbed up a lot of hills & steps. Not a good day for a skirt & flip flops... There are signs all over the rocks that say "no climbing" but people were doing it anyway. That definitely wouldn't fly in America. We walked to the very top of Longevity Hill and got some beautiful views of the lake and Beijing. After that, we took a boat ride across the lake to the other side and then ate lunch. We had dumplings at a little restaurant inside the palace. They were ok, but not as good as baozi or my pancake this morning.

Summer Palace is huge, so we were exhausted from all of the walking. We decided it was time to the hostel. We tried to take a taxi but they were being jerks & didn't want to turn on the meter. So, we had to walk to the subway station. By the time we got onto the first of our 3 subways our feet were killing!! We finally got back to the hostel and rested for a bit. Then we had to walk to the bank. Finally, we are back. We plan to stay here most of the night, except we will need dinner.

So, one weird/exciting thing in China is that we are basically celebrities. All of the Chinese people stare at us constantly. They like to take our picture and usually try and act sly about it. The brave ones will come up and ask us to pose with them. This happened like 6 times today at the Summer Palace. It is pretty entertaining. I assume that after a while it will get annoying, but it still is funny now.

Our class starts tomorrow. We have to wake up super early because we need to be at the class by 8 and it is an hour away by bus. That means it will probably be a early night for us. We sound super lame, but I swear we aren't. We are just doing so much during the day that we don't have much energy to do stuff at night.

Nap time! Have a great Monday, America!