Two things I've been surprised by on this trip - Beijing is neither as polluted or as crowded as I expected. Well, this weekend I went to some of Beijing's "A" list tourist attractions, and I found out where all the Beijingers have been hiding out. According to the Chinese government you can fit 1 million people in Tiananmen Square (or 300,000 according to everyone else in the world) and I think between the zoo and the Summer Palace on Saturday I found the other 19 million.
I went to the zoo to see the giant pandas, of course. One of my schoolmates said not to bother because they look so sad, but how can you tell if a panda bear feels sad? And don't worry, due to the sheer number of crowds this is the best view you'll get of them anyways:
Just kidding. I'm about a foot taller than everyone else and I have a telephoto lens:
There is quite a lot to see at the Beijing Zoo, much more than I expected. They even have a fairly awesome aquarium. Or so I hear, because I marched straight through the zoo to the boat launch, to get a boat to the Summer Palace.
The boat travels up the old canals, and takes about an hour. It's quite impressive to think that all this was constructed hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Every single lake in Beijing is man made. Take a look at the size of the lake at the Summer Palace! Anyways I was the only laowai (foreigner) on board. All the announcements were in Chinese and I couldn't get enough of the drift to tell if they were safety announcements or they were giving some cultural information about the canals. When we arrived everyone raced out of the boat and I wondered why the Chinese were in such a rush all the time. I wasn't sure where the Summer Palace was so I just followed the crowd, and found out that we were actually changing boats! (That must have been what all the announcements were about!) I barely made the connection and lost my primo window seat to boot.
The Summer Palace is basically like a large park. (Because that's what it is.) It's dominated by a large lake (man made as I mentioned) which you can walk around and cross all kinds of neat bridges. At the north end there is a large pagoda that you can climb up for a nice view (for an extra 10RMB).
In the evening I went to the Peking Opera with my school. The Peking Opera is a combination of song, dance and acrobatics. It's based on stories from Chinese history and fable. One story we saw was called "Steal Immortal Grass". It was about White Lady Snake, who got drunk and then revealed her true form to her husband, who died of fright. white Lady Snake then went to the top of Kunlun Mountain to steal the Immortal Grass to save her husband, who then stayed with her even knowing her true form. It was a tender love story!
Unlike everywhere else in Beijing, this performance was full of foreigners. I'd like to find the version of the performance that the Chinese go to!
#end
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