Some more August

We were the luckiest people this night. In Beijing there is a famous dish - Peking Duck. A group of six of us decided to travel out to one of the few restaurants that serves the true Peking Duck and see what all the fuss was about. We had to split the group and take two cabs, and this was before we had cell phones so we ended up getting lost from each other in the huge square where the restaurant district was. My group split up to try and see if we could locate the other three. I finally found the other group and asked them to go get us a table while I went and grabbed the rest of my group. When we returned to the restaurant we couldn't find the other three anywhere. We walked through the place a few times with now luck, and as you can see this was a nice place and it was a bit awkward just roaming between tables. Finally a manager of the restaurant saw us and asked if we needed help. We described our friends and he got on a walkie talkie asking if any of the staff had seen them - no one had. So we started walking back out and ran into a member of the other group, Cliff. They had come to get a table, saw that there was at least an hour wait and decided to go back outside and look for another place to eat. The four of us there were now in the restaurant started trying to decided if we really wanted to wait for the meal of a lifetime. Well, my new friend, the manager, came up to me and excitedly asked if Cliff was who we had been looking for. I said yes and thanked him for his help. He motioned for our group to come into the eating area so I followed him. He then smiled and showed us an eight person table, asked us to sit and let us cut in front of the line and get the glorious Peking Duck. We found the others in our group and they joined. The meal was DEFINITELY worth it - probably one of the best things I have ever eaten. Also, right as we were sitting down the evening entertainment show started with balancing and magician acts. It was perfect.


The Great Wall. This was the hardest I worked to see a national monument. You have to climb a mountain of steps to then walk up more steps to get on the wall. And then there are more steps to walk along the wall. But again, it was completely worth it. And you get to take a luge down the mountain!


This was the room I and my roommate Catherine stayed in for the two and a half weeks


This is the Tower of Buddhist Fragrance within the Summer Palace in Beijing. The Summer Palace is an imperial garden that spans almost 3 square kilometers. It is amazingly beautiful, all of the buildings have unique paintings and figurines that create almost a magical world. There were five of us that went on the trip and I was really glad to have adventurous friends with me. We had gotten there too late to go into any of the buildings so we just picked random directions as we went and started walking. Parts of the palace throughout the ages have been destroyed and rebuilt but the Chinese rulers have always made sure to keep as much of the place intact as possible.