happy fourth of july!

yesterday i woke up at 5am and it felt like i had slept past noon. jet lag is killer! so i chilled in the room with britni and we watched some chinese soap operas. we also went to 7-11 and got some breakfast and then walmart to get some supplies. apparently they don't use plastic bags here so you carry what you buy. on the way back from walmart we saw a mom and son that had been on our canceled flight. it was so random! we met up with the rest of the group around 10:30 and took the subway to tienanmen  square where we saw those two people again! i stopped to talk to them and it turns out she is a professor at USC's law school. what a small world!

we walked around for a while and it was slightly surreal to think about all that has happened there. it reminded me how important it is to learn and teach history (even though i hate memorizing names and dates). when we got hungry we went hunting for some food and ended up at a restaurant famous for it's peking duck. i had duck gizzard! getting adventurous already. i really liked duck meat so it was a good meal. we then walked around the street and saw some scorpion kabobs. no thanks. i got really tired all of a sudden so i went back to the apartment, showered, and crashed around 7pm.


 woke up today at 6 so i felt pretty rested today... that is until we hiked the great wall of china. this morning we met up at 9:30 with the rest of the group and our tour guide for the day (daniel). we all piled on a bus/van similar to the ones we rode in the dominican. the ride out to the section of the wall called mutianyu was about 1.5 hours long but it passed quickly because daniel was telling the history of the wall and other things. he knew so much! he said this section of the wall is the lowest part of the wall and it is not too steep. um we believed him. then we got there. these mountians pop out of nowhere!! then we hiked to the wall itself. sounds easy, right? actually it was more like climbing the incline. the weather here is hot and humid just like SC except with worse air conditioning. then the wall itself had quite a few steep parts. i should not have eaten my subway sandwich before i hiked. puking on a wonder of the world did not sound like a great idea :) all that aside, it was so beautiful!!! awesome views and so much history. after hiking a while we rode a cable car down the mountain and we were actually in the car that president clinton rode in when he visited. there were also lots of souvenier stands at the bottom of the mountain that you could bargin with. but i only know how to bargin in spanish! so it was interesting. i got a surprise for my sister :)

we got back on the bus/van around 4 and drove to the chinese art district called warehouse 798. i hear it is like soho. even though i'm not a very artsy person, it was still cool to see another culture's art. it is also a place you can still find a lot of socialist propaganda and slogans. but i can't read them anyway. we spent an hour there then drove back to the microsoft building. i ate dinner at KFC to celebrate the fourth :) it was pretty good even though i ordered by pointing and the menu. and KFC has ice in their drinks!!! that is reason enough to go there. stopped at walmart one more time on the way back to the apt where the AC in our room had turned itself off again. gotta get that fixed tomorrow because sleeping in an 85 degree room just won't do for two months.

the real work begins tomorrow. gotta go to the bank around 8:30 then meetings begin at 10:30.