Weekend in Beijing

We just had our very first weekend in Beijing! Since this is one of our only completely free weekends, with no scheduled events, some students decided to go to Shanghai for the weekend!. Katie, Lena, Greg, Ana and Wenjie all took the overnight train to Shanghai. They are working on a blog post so hopefully that will be up soon! The rest of us who stayed behind had an awesome weekend!

On Saturday we had a long day of walking and sightseeing. We went to see Yuanmingyuan (the Old Summer Palace). It was amazing. There were gardens upon gardens all over the area and also an area of ruins of the Old Summer Palace that were destroyed in the Opium Wars. It was amazing to see the beautiful landscape that is so deep in history. After Yuanmingyuan, we visited the main campus of Peking University. It is a gorgeous campus with many beautiful buildings and sites to see. We also bought PKU t-shirts! It was a fun day filled with LOTS of walking.

The group on a bridge over a lake at Yuanmingyuan

Saturday night was also fun. The next day was the birthday of one of the PKU students , Monica, who had been helping us out a lot. We decided to take her out for dinner to celebrate. It was and excellent time and she was able to order us a lot of good food.

Anh, Laura, Dr. Burgess, Wenisa and Susan pose for a picture at PKU's main campus

After a long day on Saturday we were all ready to sleep in on Sunday. So we did! Then once we woke up we decided to go downtown to wander around and get lunch. We took a taxi to the subway station about a mile down the street. This was an adventure. We had to take three taxis and only one made it directly to the subway station. Another was dropped off miles away the station and had to take another taxi to the correct station. The taxi that I was in dropped us off far away and we took another taxi that drove around the street and dropped us off in the same spot we were dropped off before. These taxi drivers need sharpen up. So after about 2 hours of wandering we finally made it to the subway station about 1 mile down the road from our dorm.

We were all very hungry after this adventure so we ate at the first restaurant we saw. Then we walked around downtown for a while and came back to our dorm. It was a very fun weekend and we all enjoyed getting to know each other better!

Zai jian!