Day 2

Today, I woke up and went to the dumpling stand near the school. Those things are really good, it is essentially grease and pork inside bread for very cheap, since it's China.

After that, we had class, which was basically a sort of orientation of rules and regulations, etc...
Next, we took a bus to nearer the center of the city and had us some lunch at a vegetarian restaurant. None of the food was particularly good (except the rice), but it did look like somewhat convincing meat. After that we walked to the Beijing city planning museum. On the way, a lady selling things followed us almost to the museum, but I don't think anyone bought anything from her. We arrived at the museum and were lead around the exhibits regarding old Beijing by a Chinese man who looked pretty much exactly like Boris Badenov. The museum itself was pretty interesting. A prominent feature was the miniature version of the entire city. The entire time I was looking at the model city, the Godzilla music was running through my head.

After we were done with the museum, we made our way to Tienanmen Square for our next assignment. It was an exercise entitled "Mystery Beijing." For this assignment, were split into groups of two, with one Chinese and one Japanese studdent in each group. We were given the name of a place in Beijing, written in Chinese. We were only allowed to use our atlases and communication with the locals to find our way. By the atlas, I found pretty quickly that that our location was directly north of us. As were walking towards one of the nearest subway stops, we heard people talking to us in bad English from behind. There was a group of three or four Chinese people (college aged, mostly female) who apparently wanted to take a picture with us. They took the picture, and my teammate, Dereck(sp?), asked them about the location of our destination. We found out exactly how to get there using the bus system, and we did so. Our location (pronounced Gulou, or something) was an ancient tower containing many large drums. it was used for keeping track of the time in old Beijing. We got to dee people do a performance on the drums as well, it was pretty dang cool. Here's a drum.

On the way back to report our success, we stopped by an electronics store and I purchased a set of video game peripherals worth $200 US. I spend about $13 US. China is cheap. We got back without further incident.