One Blonde in a Sea of Brunettes

Sunday September 5
    Again we ate at the delicious breakfast buffet and were able to have a long time to rest in the morning. We needed to pack our bags anyways. When we left the hotel at 11am, we headed off to see Tian’an Men square and the Forbidden City. Man I had no idea how huge that place was! Everything in Beijing just seems enormous. The painting of Mao Zedong had to have been at least six feet tall and the building the size of three football fields. My roommate Des and I decided to take a picture with Mao, but not just an ordinary one- one in which we were both kissing him at the same time! Its too bad that the picture didn’t quite turn out right because it was kind of blurry, but it was still awesome non-the-less! When we got inside of the Forbidden City we met a girl who was wearing sunglasses that said it was her birthday with lots of candles. We had no choice but to sing happy birthday in Chinese! She was obviously appalled by us publicly humiliating her, but we enjoyed it. Hopefully she wasn’t too embarrassed.
    The forbidden city itself was unbelievable. I honestly don’t think I can describe the massiveness of this place. It was a sea of gold rooftops above massive rose red buildings with intricate paintings and magnificent sculptures. They had these enormous bowl looking things (bigger than me) that were used as fire hydrants just encase a fire started. I think it was supposed to be filled with rainwater.
    Later that day we ended up going to a street called Xiu Shui, it was fully of really impressive artists and big places to buy all the tools to paint traditional Chinese calligraphy and art.  We met a few nice older women and some artists, but unfortunately their paintings were incredibly expensive. Afterward we went to get the infamous Peking duck that everyone talks about. They brought us a huge amount of food before they even brought duck but all of it was so tasty! When they carved the duck they left the crispy skin on it and showed us how to eat it. Basically it was like a taco with yummy sauce veggies and la ja (spicy chili sauce.)
    When we finished we had to head to the train station to make sure we made it on time. Of course when we go there we had plenty of time. This train was really interesting though. It was a sleeper train and we were all booked to have top bunks. Which kind of sucks because there are other random people sleeping below us. Des and I got lucky and got a cute old Chinese couple that didn’t understand any of the Chinese we spoke to them but it still turned out fine. There was enough space for our baggage and we had a private light and everything.