Sunday, September 11, 2011

I Love Being a Tourist



Why hello there. :) So I had a super exciting weekend. It involved doing a lot of tourist-y things, hanging out with my old BC Calculus teacher, and a lot of rugby.

So Friday, I decided I want to see more of the city, so I hopped the subway over to 天安门广场(Tiananmen Square) to see what the deal was. I mean, you've gotta be a tourist at some point, and I have been warned that I should do it now because the October holiday when there are approximately many million MORE people in this city (haha) and before it's gets unreasonably cold.


Mao and I, we're like basically BFFs now. The most entertaining part of this picture though is so I asked this lady who was with her like whole family to take my picture. She obliged super nicely and then, so in Beijing there are a ton of international people because it's a pretty major city. However, people who are hanging around the tourist-y areas are probably not from Beijing. Therefore, white people, we're a bit of a spectacle. So after she took my picture, she asked me to take a picture with my "new friend", her little two-year-old son. I mean, so I obliged, and afterwards the son gave me the most adorable "Thank you" in existence. It was kind of amusing.

Here are some more pictures from the 天安门 area:
正阳门箭楼(Zheng4yang2 Men2jian4lou2)
正阳(Zheng4yang2) Gate
毛主席纪念堂 (Mao2Zhu3zi2 ji4nian4tang2) - Chairman Mao Zedong Memorial Hall
And for fun, these were pretty awesome. They're little Chinese soldier dudes that shuffle along on their own making gun noises. I thoroughly enjoyed them.

Also, I apologize for the insanely long post! This weekend was pretty busy, and I have an insanely large amount of photos (Of which, I am legitimately sharing only a small amount!). Anyhow, on Sunday, I happened to meet up with an old friend (haha), my old BC Calculus teacher, Hedrick:

because it is, in fact, much easier for us to meet up randomly in Asia than in the the States. Haha. We decided to make a trek along the Great Wall (because I had not been yet, given that I've only been here, you know, a week, and he had only been once), specifically in the unrestored part of the 司马台 (Si1ma3tai2) section of the Wall. I think it was much cooler than seeing the restored parts, and climbing through the super steep rubble was pretty exciting and somewhat treacherous. Like, quite literally, I'm pretty sure you would just not be able to go on terrain like this in the States because there are definitely parts where like, stairs are missing, super steep, crumbling, and whatnot. At the very least, they would have built in handrails are something. Anyways, super-exciting! And of course, I took lots of pictures:

We finished off the day by heading back to Beijing and going out to 北京大董烤鸭店 (Da Dong Roast Duck) for some insanely delicious Peking Duck, of course, the city's specialty:

That's the general gist of my weekend, and sorry for the insanely long post! Hopefully, I made up for it with exciting photos. :) Expect more soon! My mother made a special request to see more of my school so I'll try and get some photos of that.

hearts and stars,
马雅

4 comments:

  1. Nice post! but please buy another camera!

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  2. Oh my god you had peking duck in Beijing. I AM SO JEALOUS OH MY GOD.

    Also, Hedrick wat?!

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  3. this is so cool! and please, no apologies for long posts - just keep the pictures (and stories) coming!

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