Friday, July 1, 2011

China: Thursday

Most of Wednesday was spent at the Summer Palace. It's a place where the royals went to get away from the Forbidden City during the summer. An empress in the early 1900s really liked it so most of the audio guide spoke about her.
Here is our group: Igor, Scott, Robert & Cecilie

All the ceilings in China are so beautifully painted. I guess they used to paint them black to prevent the wood from rotting and then they decided to decorate them and it really became an art.

Here we are climbing the Temple of Buddha in the hope of peace, tranquility and breakfast.

Scott eating my snacks at the top of the Temple of Buddha. (He made fun of me for packing so many snacks but then started eating them almost as soon as we landed.)

A beautiful building.

Scott and I with a random mad who wouldn't smile for his picture but also took about 100 takes to get just the right one. Seriously, he wouldn't move.

Seriously, they eat this for breakfast?

We rented a paddle boat to take around the lake. It was so fun and beautiful to see the entire place from afar.

You can see the Temple of Buddha in teh background. I thought it would be a short hill to the top; nope, it was a steep hike.

Another view of the Temple.
I give them empress a lot of credit for the beautiful architecture and stuff but she loses a lot of credibility with this stone boat. Did she really think it could float?

This hutong (aka neighborhood) was about a 5 minute walk from Tiananmen Square. I was so surprised by all the poverty in China. It's much more third world than I expected.

Another picture of the hutongs.

And this is the inside of a hutong where we ate Peking Duck; seriously. Scott's guide book talked about a local place to get great duck. It took us a while to find the place and as much as I was hoping we'd just give up I was the one who inadvertently found it. Woof.

We were the first dinner patrons, they were still de-boning something on a table.

They show you the cooked duck before cutting it up for you.
Then they give you the 'meat' that's left. Scott really enjoyed the ambiance and food. It was quite an evening!
Oh wait, our evening wasn't done. After dinner we met up with the last grad student to arrive early: Jay Lee. He's Korean and was a huge help since he could take an educated guess at some of the Chinese words. Chinese people would ask him where we were all from but since he doesn't speak Chinese it was pretty funny.

Jay was hungry so we decided to check out a night market. I thought it would just be a normal thing but I should have known better after being in China for a few days. They served such delicacies as scorpion, shark, snake, sheep genitalia, and other not so delicious items. Most items were already dead, just waiting to be fried and salted before enjoying, but the small scorpions were still alive on a stick. You could watch their little legs wiggle.

Robert and Scott tried the little scorpions. They're crazy!

How delicious!
My favorite part of the evening was that we ended up going to KFC to get Jay dinner. There was no way he was touching anything at the night market. Smart boy.
Posted by Picasa

1 comment:

  1. I love these China posts - your commentary is hilarious. Rush has been sitting on my lap looking at your post, too, and his commentary is just as great. At each of the gross food pictures he goes, "Mmmmm!" And every time we scroll past the picture of the empress's stone boat he says, "Bama's house." Sorry little boy, that's NOT Grandma's house...

    ReplyDelete