Not really—I’ve loved Beijing a lot. Today’s our last full day in Beijing, and we’ve had the day mostly to ourselves. This morning, we presented our finals in Chinese class—ours was awful, we were all tripping all over our words, and I think we completely butchered the language beyond recognition, but hey—it’s done. I’m officially fluent (in my own little world). The advanced groups’ skits were really impressive, and made me want to take Chinese more (though I looked, and it definitely won’t fit into my schedule for next year).
For our free time, I really wanted to go to the Houhai Lake district to see the sights there. Just north of the Forbidden City, there’s this manmade lake that’s a hotspot for its traditional and modern sights. All along the skinny side of the lake, there is bar after bar that tried to get us to come in. It’s definitely what I’ve been told is the bar hotspot in Beijing, and we could tell, even at 5pm. There didn’t seem to be many places to dance in the immediate vicinity though. The main reason I wanted to go here though was to see the Drum and Bell towers there—these two big buildings that definitely stand out above all the single-story buildings in the vicinity. The Drum Tower is talker, but the Bell tower apparently has one of the largest bells in China. Either way, they were both closed by the time we got there, which was highly disappointing. So instead of climbing those, my roommate Eamon haggled with the rickshaw manager to get us a 40 minute rickshaw tour of the hutongs (traditional housing complexes and alleyways) for only Y80 (~$12) for all 3 of us. It wasn’t incredibly interesting—I didn’t even really know what we were looking at—but Eamon really liked it and it was nice and relaxing.
After the rickshaw tour, it was getting close to sunset so we booked it over to Tiananmen Square (after stopping through Houhai lake to check out the bar street), and made it just in time. There were hundreds more people here for the flag lowering ceremony than there were for the flag raising ceremony, which I guess makes sense. Again, we didn’t go inside the square, but this time only because the view would have been horrible (I remembered my passport though!). We watched from the gate of the Forbidden City, and it turned out great. We met up with Yeong there after the ceremony, went back to the Chinese National Opera House to get some pictures of the sun setting (the wind was blowing, so the reflection didn’t show up this time), and made the long, long trek back to campus (3 subway transfers and probably a total of 1.5 miles walking). They’re working on a subway line that literally has a stop at Bei Da’s front door, but it won’t be finished for 2 more years.
Last night in Beijing—tonight’s probably going to be ridiculous. I don’t think anyone really knows what we’re doing yet but it should be a good time. Let’s hope I make my flight this time.
