Chopstick Land

Items Lost: Zero.
Times Lost: Zero.
Near death experiences: Two.

When we landed in Beijing, we headed to Tsinghua University, where we would be staying on campus. We had dinner in the guest house: Peking duck. I went to bed pretty early because I was exhausted. On our second day we headed out to Tiananmen Square. Famous, famous square. It is the gate to the Forbidden City. Well, four of us students were running behind the rest of the group. So we had to run through the square with our Chinese students, trying to catch up. Well, meanwhile, Tiananmen Square is flashing before our eyes. I had enough time to hand Big Tom my camera to take one picture. Too bad he moved at the last second and I officially have my feet on the cobblestone of Tiananmen Square. There’s one for the Christmas card. So we spent a couple hours in the Forbidden City. Ridiculously, RIDICULOUSLY huge. Seriously, I’m not quite sure how someone could live there. It makes the Versailles in France look like servants quarters. You would enter a square with large ornate buildings surrounding you, thinking oh wow this is huge. Then you would go through a gate and repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat at least 4 times until you realize, oops, there are palaces alongside every one of these huge squares that we missed? Not 1 palace, but 6 East palaces and 6 West palaces? Of course half of the time you are there trying to figure out where to go, you are either asked to take a picture with someone, their kid, or they forgo the asking and try and discretely take it without you noticing. It didn’t help I was walking around with a really tall brunette and my hair is platinum blonde. Afterwards we headed to the Temple of Heaven, where they would make their sacrifices to the Gods. Basically, it was more ornate buildings. I was pretty content just drinking my ice tea and counting down the time until lunch. Finally we went to lunch which was another share style restaurant that had some pretty bomb chicken. How sad is it that the highlights of my day is usually food? Typical. After lunch we headed to a flying acrobatic show. I was expecting something along the lines of a Disney show, with women doing intricate stretches in beaded uniforms. Um, no. This was ridiculous. Men were jumping on a teeter totter on stilts, being flung mid-air only to sit on a suspended chair or hang onto a suspended stick. Women piled onto one bike by the dozen, hanging onto who knows what while it was moving. A giant pyramid formed with a man on top balancing himself on a wooden platform resting on a ball, then proceeding to jump on it so a spoon would go into his hat. I mean, undescribable. I could hardly do it justice. The most insane act was this giant mouse wheel suspended in mid air. Two men walked along the edges, with huge black bags over their heads, while it was moving in circles, tripping and nearly falling two stories. Anyways, we finished up with our day pretty early so they decided to drop us off at the Silk Street Pearl Market. I had heard of this from my mom and was expecting to pull up to a street market. No, a building. A heavenly building. 4 floors of whatever your little heart could desire and more. Most people are ‘drinking around the world,’ well I am ‘shopping around the world.’ I got overly consumed in the purse floor that I never even made it to the clothes or pearls. I met my friends at the restaurants alongside the market after it had closed and got- gasp, sigh, drool- SUBWAY! A delectable 6 inch Italian with tomatoes that are red, actually red, and lettuce that isn’t dripping in soggy water, and cheese that AREN’T in the form of blocks. Even writing about it now I am swallowing pretty hard, holding my breath until Hawaii for one of my weaknesses. In case you haven’t noticed or caught on, the food on the ship is a little, uh, predictable? There has to be something wrong with me if I am more excited about the Subway then, oh, Tiananmen Square? Haha… typical, Vanessa, typical.