Beijing

I was able to meet up with Mike in the Beijing Airport, and we headed to our hostel last night.

When we arrived it was too late to do anything too cool, so we just went to Lake Hou Hai and walked around a little. The lake was full of night life, and had a bunch of really cool things going on (like a pick up gymnastics competition between the locals).

Then, Mike was jet lagged, so we ended up going to bed around 11 or so. Little did we know we had the worst roommates ever in the hostel, and they treated our room like a party talking laughing and overall being the rudest people I ever encountered in a hostel.

When we woke up the thee of us headed to the famous Summer Palace. Historically it's almost identical to Versailles, but the facilities themselves are much different. It's this gigantic estate with a lake in the middle of it, and structured very similar to a Buddhist temple. We actually entered from the wrong side, and kind of made our way backwards through a forest to get to the gate. Once in side it was pretty cool, but no where near as elaborate as Versailles. We then rented a boat and took it out on the lake for a while. Overall it was really cool, but very similar to a lot of the different temples we've been to. While in the Summer Palace we were trying to play a local version of hackie-sack. We were obviously terrible, and made fools of ourselves, but it was fun regardless.

When we left the summer palace we tried to go to the Olympic grounds only to find that we weren't allowed within 100 meters of the birds nest or water cube, which was obviously disappointing. So, we took some pictures through a fence and moved on.

In the evening Mike and I went to this Beijing acrobatics show, which was cool, but nothing you haven't seen at halftime of NBA games. It was also kind of dirty. It looked like this may have been a really spectacular show in 1983, but that they have failed to updated and renovate it. After we tried to meet up with Jake, but were very late due to the flag ceremony at Tienanmen Square.

Once we finally met up with him we headed to a section of town called Xidan, which is like the big downtown shopping district. While we were there I bought a China national team Yi Jianlian jersey (which is awesome!), and then we tried to find ourselves dinner. Dinner turned out to be more difficult than we thought because there were so few restaurants in this area (which we all found odd). We eventually decided to go to this hotel and ask someone where to find something to eat. The woman at the desk was obviously appalled at our cloths, and told us to go to the 7th floor of that building. Then the guy next to her tried to show us the hotel restaurant across the hall, but the lady hit him and started to yell something in Chinese to him. We think she was saying we were too dirty to eat at there hotel. As we attempted to go to that 7th floor we realized it was closed, so we hit the streets again. We eventually did find a Beijing style hot pot restaurant. The Beijing style was good. Not as spicy as the Seczuan style, but still had enough flavor.

When we got back to the hostel Mike went to sleep, and Jake and I stayed up talking with two Italian girls (Lucy and Elana). They were harassing us about Pizza, and how Italian Pizza is much better, which is ridiculous because they had never even had Chicago style.

Well, Were off to tour the inside of Tienanmen Square, and other historical sites form the people's revolution today.