Here are photos of our room - it's awesome. And the amenities are adorable - little shower caps, toothbrushes with the tiniest toothpaste tubes imaginable, and slippers among other things!
The towels even have the characters for the hotel engraved - another nice touch.
On our first day in Beijing, we had great luck that our own Professor Zhao was on Chinese national TV at 7:38am doing a lecture on Laozi (Lao Tzu), and so our Chinese Civilization class began. Our next assignment was to take our breakfast tickets down to the swanky little buffet on the ground floor, stare at both Chinese and English on the food name cards, still not be quite sure of what we were eating, and debut our chopsticking skills. And don't worry, the other two from my taxi group last night made it here safe and sound, apparently only about 10 minutes after we did, because they ended up in a different terminal and the buses between terminals had stopped for the night. We all greeted each other over a spread of veggies, eggs, rice soup, and various forms of fried and steamed, possibly filled, dough.
After a group meeting in the lobby, Zhao took us for a spin around Jin Chun Yuan and the famous Lotus Pond. Cute stone arch bridges over lily-padded waters (this natural body of water actually looks clean - the river we cross to exit campus: not so much) and winding pathways not quite big enough for two people wide unless somebody wants to take a refreshing tumble into the pond led us to a park where everybody was doing their Sunday morning exercise. It was adorable old people galore! A couple of our own even joined them in the dancing, though the American swing had somewhat of a different feel to it than Chinese social dance.
After hanging out under the beautiful pavilions for a little while, we made our way to go say hello to Confucius. Zhao Laoshi gave us about an hour lecture on the history of Confucianism in China in about half Chinese half English, so many Chinese passersby snuck photos of us and listened in as well.
After the conclusion of "class" for the day, the group split up as some went to go buy Chinese cell phones and others ended up in different directions for lunch. My group of pengyou (friends) ate at a restaurant where some of them had actually eaten the night before, and in kind of a comical situation of table switching that resulted in a group just arriving receiving our food, we all managed to eat a bunch of wonderful dishes that we still didn't know how to read but at least how to pronounce. Then a quick stop in at a convenience store where I found Hi-Chew (Asian Starbursts, only better), blueberry-flavored Xylitol gum (China is ahead of the US in healthy gum!), and banana chips for snacking. Yum.
Some observations so far:
- Literally whenever you get hungry, you can always find something - either a snack on the street which you can bargain for or some sort of eatery. Cantaloupe on a stick would be a wonderful addition to the MN State Fair - it's everywhere here! Some random sort of granola bar creation, nuts roasted on coals right in front of you, and roasted corn and yams are pretty popular too.
- Everybody loves to ring their bike bells (just like Dad and me!).
- I love taking pictures of people and their bikes. I'm really fascinated by the people here. I am loving taking pictures of everything large and small, and I'm trying to do my best to get good people shots without being a truly creepy, insensitive foreigner.
For the afternoon, we regrouped to go to the Summer Palace where the Empress Dowager of the Qing Dynasty resided. We learned about history as we wandered around the incredible lake and the intensely beautiful ancient Chinese architecture. It's so much better than I imagined it when I read The Last Empress a couple years ago. Also much louder and much more crowded than the palace was when it housed the Empress Dowagers and her servants. But definitely gorgeous. Apparently she took money out of the navy budget to revamp this place for her birthday one year... 
This cute little old man was just hanging out, writing characters on the pathway in water - so cool! Jake then joined him.
The group splintered to explore more of the Summer Palace for ourselves, so Alek, Emily, Brian, Kellianne, Rob and I took a lovely walk by the lake and then decided to hike to the top of the palace!
This is apparently the longest corridor in the world:
As we were walking along the corridor, this adorable man in traditional dress with an awesome beard was just taking pictures with people, so we snuck photos of him. Which he then noticed. So as we kind of snuck away, he started taking pictures of us! Emily was the only one to work up the courage to ask for a photo with him, and then I just felt silly and asked for one too! He complimented us on our Chinese and said we were cute too. How funny.
Some random photos from our walk: dragon boats, vendors, architecture, our climb.
The view from the top! (Check out the actual city of Beijing to the left.) Then we made our way down and wandered along Suzhou Street kind of at the foot of the palace where we found fun trinkets, received compliments on our Hanyu (spoken Mandarin), and admired lots of cute people and crafts.
From each hole in the wall we passed, the people sitting outside beckoned us to come have a look at their wares, and one time was a kind of entertaining experience. One store that we entered was filled with beautiful silk scarves (which I would love to buy at some point), but the saleswoman was in the middle of taking a picture of a little girl posing on a throne all dressed up in what seemed to be an ancient princess-style dress with two young women as her handmaids. When we walked into the store, I asked if I could take a picture of them too, and then the little girl asked us to be in the picture too! We then gathered that she was the saleswoman's daughter because this adorable woman asked us a question since we spoke both English and Chinese: we were handed a tube of medicine, the woman showed us her daughter's scraped up knee, and I got to explain how to use Neosporin in Chinese!
We figured out the Beijing subway system for our ride back - 2 yuan for our ride back (something like 25 cents) with help from Rob because he had been in Beijing doing a Chinese summer program. The subway is really nice and clean, much better than the US. It got us back in a decent amount of time for a shower before Zhao Laoshi treated us to dinner at the hotel restaurant specifically so we could try Beijing's specialty: Beijing kaoya (Peking duck). It's always a dicey game to play to figure out exactly how many dishes to order, especially because food is automatically family-sized shareable portions, but it was great to have dinner in such a large group to try some yummy kaoya as well as a bunch of different kinds of shucai (veggies), dumplings (jiaozi), doufu (tofu), and meat dishes too so we could have an idea of what we'd like when we're on our own for meals.After dinner, as part of my work I helped Zhao Laoshi write the first letter to the parents about our adventures, and then Kellianne (my shiyou, roommate) and I had a pretty chill evening. The picture count for my first day and a half, I was told by iPhoto, was 313. Therefore, I'll try to put up a few more of my favorites on Picasa too. Thank goodness for laptops and large camera memory cards!
Until I'm able to write again, love from China!
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