Beijing!

So apparently I am miserably bad at updating blogs...

I've been up to a lot of things, the coolest of which being my trip last weekend to Beijing with 5 of my best girl friends here. We decided to be cheap and take the slow-moving train-horrible decision! We had hard seats, with people who only bought standing tickets crowding all around us, for fifteen hours!! Longest trip of my life-it was faster flying from Toronto to Shanghai than it was going from Shanghai to Beijing. Luckily I slept some so it didn't seem to be as freakishly long. We got there Friday morning and checked into our hostel, which was this gorgeous, clean, very home-y place called Sun Lu Tan youth hostel. That day we went to Tiananmen square, the Forbidden City, and Linshiang (?) Park. Tiananmen was actually kind of boring, it's just a really big square, until you remember the history behind it. I spent most of my time emphasizing with the guards who had to stand at attention all day and judging the marching of the ones going past us. The Forbidden City was really cool and huge!, but most of the actual rooms you aren't allowed in. The park we went to after was an unexpected highlight-you could climb up a ton of stairs to several pagodas that had awesome views of the Forbidden City and the rest of Beijing.

The next day we went to the Great Wall!!! Such an awesome experience! We went to Mutianwu, which is a less touristy part of the Wall, with some sections that haven't been restored available to explore. The Wall is seriously so impressive-you can see it snake through the mountains for miles. As impressive as it is now, it must have been awe-inspiring back in its heyday. The Chinese have another word for it-The World's Biggest Cemetery, since so many of their people died building it. We rode a ski-lift to the top then were able to explore some. It's actually much steeper than you'd imagine, some of the stretches had stairs so steep they looked like vertical drop-offs from above. Several of my friends and I bought beers and shot-gunned them on the wall, which might be the coolest thing I've done in China so far! Totally legal, too ;)

Our final day was spent in the Temple of Heaven, which again was very cool, but you couldn't see that much inside. Then we were all too tired to go anywhere else so we just went to the train station and hung out there...and got accosted by multiple Chinese men. Beijing was weird that way-Shanghai people stare, but Beijing people will actually come up to you, which is really annoying. I'm not sure I like Beijing as a city, it seems really confused as to what it wants to be, either the seat of the government, a rival to Shanghai, or an ancient relic? I think it's trying to be all of it at once. After another hellish 15 hours on a train we were home sweet home in Shanghai =)

Awesome Western-style Breakfast in Beijing

Great Wall group at an
 un-restored portion

Me, Natasha, and Jenn at the Temple of Heaven

Me with the Great Wall spanning behind me

Eating a scorpion! So crunchy!

Such an epic moment

And a snake! Better than it looks I promise!

Sledding down the Great Wall!

Mal, me, and jenn at Tiananmen Square

All of us at the start of our 15 hour train
(We were a lot less happy at the end of it haha)

My spring break starts next week-Mal and I are backpacking south, starting in the Yellow Mountains and finishing in Hainan, said to be the Hawaii of China. Should be an adventure!