The End of a First Session and Chinatown

After our awesome trip to Tianjin we wandered the streets of Beijing around the Forbidden City to see the sights! First we went and saw the famous gardens next to Forbidden City and climbed to the top of a temple that overlooks all of downtown Beijing, pretty cool! Would have been more impressive had the sky been clear...smog sucks. but still cool to see. The next day we went and saw the China Art Museum, very interesting, a lot of old chinese paintings as well as some modern chinese photograps and a Goya exhibit as well as a bunch of other things it was awesome.

Then we were off to the two major shopping centers there. They are painfully large and crowded, at first we were amazed by it, but after trying to get around the dizzying displays of millions of knock-off clothes we got lost in an 8 story mall that was slammed with people. On top of that we wondered around what could only have been Chinatown in China...it was like the mecca of Chinatowns, way cool but exhausting to say boo yao (no thanks) to vendor after vendor offering endless junk for best price!

As we were wondering around the city we happened to stumble upon a strange roller coaster type contraption just chilling in the middle of the sidewalk. The first things out of Diogo's and Pat's mouths were "we're doing it". Now for those of you who know me well will know how I felt about this...But all that aside they both strapped in to the unknown as pat was asking the ride operator if he could guarantee they wouldnt die on the ride, the ride operator's response was a simple "no" and then pat told him he would come back as a ghost and haunt the ride operator if he died, and the operator responded "no no dont do that". Needless to say it was hilarious to watch them scream like little girls as they were reversed bungee jumped into the air and fell back down like the Big Shot in Las Vegas on Crack.

We are now almost done teaching our final group of middle school students in the Southern Beijing school in BDA. Next week we are off to northern Beijing to our next school for a whole new set of kids and crazy experiences. Teaching is definitely fun, and I really have no idea how they are letting us teach...the kids deserve so much better haha. But its been fun and I cant wait to start the new school. Stay tuned!