Day 4

Hello again, it's still really cold here.
When I left for class I saw what I call the Jesus-cycle. If you get it, then you know something about Christianity.

Today in class, we learned about Beijing and about the layout of the old city. An interesting thing is that the temples dedicated to the celestial bodies were all built outside the city walls. The guest lecturer we had was very enthusiastic and well learned. He has apparently been teaching for quite a while. After this, we went to a museum containing a lot of China and Beijing's historical art and artifacts. The exhibits ranged in time period from super-ancient to the last dynasty. One of the old bronze works, a bath basin, had a small feature which I thought was cute. It needs an, "O hai der" caption. Another piece that stood out was the face of one particular wax figure. It is a near perfect representation of the racist view of a Chinese face. It wasn't supposed to be, this figure is one in a procession of somewhat realistic looking depictions of people in a wedding parade. I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or facepalm when I saw this for the fist time. Aside from these, I really enjoyed their collection of Buddhist statues.


Anywho, after the museum, in small groups, the Chinese language students led the Japanese students (hi) to a location which they had been researching. The group in which I was went to a place that started with a Y and had ming somewhere in the name. It was the ruins of the Emperor's summer palace. The group gave us a brief history lesson and brought us through a section of the park. The snow made the ruins practically invisible, but it was a nice park anyways. Myself and Adam had a picture taken of us at a tourist spot. You may call me Emperor Jeff.

Here's a statue from the place.