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These are pictures from my trip to Beijing. I went there during the Spring Festival for about 2 weeks. Beijing is a completely different city than Shanghai. There are no skyscrapers! The streets are much wider, and the city as a whole is much more spread out than Shanghai. I really enjoyed going there and I was asked by many people: "Which city do you like more?" I would probably say Shanghai, but if I were visiting China, there is much more to see in Beijing. Beijing is more of the "real" China in that it is has much more Chinese culture than Shanghai. I have many pictures from this trip, but these are the few I chose. The first one you see is of Beijing airport. The airport is really neat. I watched a show on television about the construction of it. I was told that many visitors go out of their way to see this airport. It is massive and consists of 3 huge hangers.

Many of these are just random photos. There are 2 photos of the Great Wall of China, which was amazing. I went to the Beijing zoo on one afternoon (I don't really know why! I wanted to see the panda exhibit I think!) I put the picture of the white tiger up there because it was the coolest picture of the zoo. This tiger seemed to be posing for everyone. You should've seen all the chinese people taking pictures of it and "oohhhing and ahhing" at it. And by the way, the stereotype about asians loving to take pictures is completely TRUE! They love to take pictures. When I was showing my friend all of my pictures from Beijing, he told me that he didn't think I took enough pictures. I took over 150!!

The coolest place I went to was the Forbidden City. There is a picture of me in front of it where I am on the sidewalk and its off in the background. I went there on the second day I was in Beijing, took a ton of pictures of it, and when I got back to my hostel, I was messing with my camera and deleted everything I had on accident! I was heartbroken! I thought about going back there just so that I could take pictures of it again! The olympic sites were really neat too. I didn't go inside the bird's nest, but I have one picture of me inside the water cube. I also went and saw the Lhama Temple, The temple of heaven, temple of harvest, Tian'anmen Square, and a few other random places.
What was really cool to see was what they call "Hutongs," which are the old Chinese neighborhoods in Beijing. The literal translation is "narrow street," but they are these clusters of very old homes where people still live, and they are spread out all around the city. It was really neat because you would be walking through a hutong, and then all of a sudden it would stop and there would be a McDonalds on the corner. Where old meets new. Most of the people who lived in these hutong neighborhoods were considerably poor, but it was really cool just to walk through these narrow streets, just wondering around. And don't worry, I got plenty of communist gear to bring home (posters, hats, red mao books, etc.) And I almost missed my flight back home because I went out with these 2 brazilians ( who were traveling the world for 6 months, which is awesome) and an australian girl. We were all in the same room at the hostel that I was staying at. Which by the way cost me $3 us dollars to stay at per night!!
But back to teaching now... the weather has warmed up a bit, but its been raining off and on for the past 2 weeks!