Two weeks before last I had an awesome week of vacation from school. For once, I took advantage of my free time to really get around and see some of the sights that I'd neglected all year - of course, the fact that Spring has arrived also helped quite a bit.

To begin with, Dan and I rode our bikes over to the Olympic Stadium (Bird's Nest) and got tickets to walk through and on to the field. From our apartment it's about a twenty minute straight shot on our bikes, quite convenient. The stadium is a really impressive piece of architecture, especially in person. As we sat in some seats and just took a look around the lower bowl, a mother and her daughter ran up to us. "Do you know how to speak Chinese?" "Yes..." "Well you see, my daughter has this part of her English homework that she doesn't understand, can you help her read it?" So we got to spend about five minutes explaining a three wishes fairy tale to this little girl. At the end the mom asked us where we studied in Beijing, and when we told her Tsinghua she and her daughter exchanged a series of three or more "Waaa!"s which were continuing as we said goodbye and walked off.

The next day we took a bit of a marathon ride to the Military Museum, nearly an hour away by bike about due south of us. The museum was cool although we only got about an hour to look around and spent much of that in the first exhibit hall. Lots of weaponry and exhibits with varying degrees of pro-CCP historical gloss, ranging from surprisingly little to unreadably heavy. The building has something like four full floors and we only saw a sort of overview exhibit, so I plan to go back and see what they have to say about Korea and what, if anything, they have about the China-Vietnam war. I think they've stopped calling it the War Against American Aggression in Korea but I'm not sure.

Then on Sunday Dan, myself and three other students from IUP (Grace, Mariel and John the Brit) headed to the Yuanmingyuan park for a picnic on the grass. We bought cheese and found a decent French bread to munch on as we watched some Chinese college-age girls struggle with a baseball. But at least it was baseball! Anyway, Yuanmingyuan or the Old Summer Palace, is the ruins of a series of gardens and Western-style palaces built towards the end of the Qing Dynasty in the 18th and 19th centuries. The palaces were all destroyed by the predominately British and French allied forces after the second Opium War, and today the issue of relics which were looted and currently reside abroad is a major one in China. You might have heard of the bronze zodiac animal head that came up for auction in France and caused a bit of a stir when the winning bidder turned out to be a Chinese citizen with no intention of paying. The gardens are in pretty good shape and very pretty - even better, there are a lot fewer people here as it is much lower profile than the actual Summer Palace although it's located right next door. The ruins are also very much worth a look as you can see below.

I'll stop there and post later with all the other sights which Mandi and I saw. Really sorry but the stadium visit was spontaneous and I had no camera! I'm sure you've all seen it on TV, or there are some pics from outside it way back on the earliest posts in my blog.

First draft of the Shanghai Communique (joint statement opening relations between the PRC and the USA) and a moon rock and flag given by President Nixon to Mao Zedong.



"Setting up the basic socialist system: Building socialism in China is the inevitable outcome of the course of modern Chinese history. The central collective leadership of the CPC, with Comrade Mao Zedong at its core ..." and so forth. One of the more unreadable displays at the museum.

Postscript: Chinese people laugh when I tell them about the current furor over "socialism" in the US. Take it from people who've lived through it - a bank bailout just doesn't quite qualify.



Striking ruins at the Old Summer Palace.



An old pool and some schoolchildren. While I said it was less crowded here, school groups absolutely overran some of the former palace sites.



The upkeep produces an interesting effect, with trimmed hedges and decent paths running alongside heaps of rubble. It's quite a big site compared to what I imagined.