Down to the Last Four Days

I'm afraid that since I don't have any pictures to post, I've gotten lax in updating my blog, as well. I won't be keeping you waiting any longer, however. I present to you, in the usual format, the past three days.

The 26th, as I mentioned, was New Years Day. Up to this point, the fireworks continue, and I don't really expect them to stop any time soon. Not at the same intensity, of course, but you'll hear a few go off every couple minutes. The 27th was class in the morning with a free afternoon. A couple of us took this free afternoon to do a little work, then head over to the Olympic Stadium. It was really neat riding up to it, the highway kind of snakes around the Green so you get something of a panoramic view of it before you actually get there. We walked around for about an hour and a half, taking pictures and whatnot. Not sure if they mentioned during the broadcasts, but the Water Cube and the Bird's Nest are right next to each other, literally about 200 yards apart. We were there late enough to see them turn on the lights, which was pretty cool, especially with the Cube. That was really the highlight of the day, though. Afterwards we headed back and got dinner, then sleep. The next day was class in the morning (as usual), then a pedicab tour of the Putong area in the afternoon. When I say pedicab, I mean these little two-seater carriage things pulled by bikes. And when I say tour, I mean a 10 minute scoot around the edge of Houhai lake. Not like it was disappointing; to the contrary, it was really interesting. I just expected there to be a little more to it, is all. We got dropped off at a house back in this Putong area (one of the oldest areas in Beijing, it's a government-protected heritage-type place), and we got to look around inside. It's really strange, looking around inside people's homes like this, like we did during our first week here. But this house was made for tourism, so we weren't really intruding at all :)
The next day we had a break from classes because we were taking our day trip to Tianjin. We left bright and early (again, as usual) and took the two hour bus ride to the city (we hit traffic going there and coming back, so it was two hours both ways, unfortunately). Tianjin is China's third largest city by population, and is one of three that is its own province (the other two are Shanghai and Beijing). It's a pretty old city, and the first thing we got to see when we got off the bus was an old market street (also a fairly common occurrence on these trips). The main attraction was a shop that sold clay figurines that had been made by the same family for five or six generations. They were outrageously priced, of course, but they were certainly well-crafted. We got to wander around there for a while, and like most of the other markets there was a lot of the same stuff with a few new things here and there. Once we were done there we loaded back up and drove to a restaurant called Gou Bu Li, famous throughout China for its steamed dumplings ("baozi" in Chinese). They teased us with their normal dishes first (naturally), but the baozi were worth the wait. Definitely one of the things I'm going to miss most back in the states... After lunch we piled back onto the bus (again) and rode to the Tianjin museum. Unfortunately for everyone involved, we only had a half-hour to look around before the museum closed. I was pleased to find that Tianjin's museum didn't have huge exhibits with the usual jade and bronze works (sorry, they get dull after a while), and the displays were really dynamic and visually captivating. We were only walking around for about fifteen minutes before they started closing exhibits and shepherding people out, though, so there wasn't enough time to really take it all in. We hopped back on the bus and drove to the Italian concession in another part of town, looked at it for a few minutes, and then made the long ride back. Needless to say, with all this bus driving, literally everyone on the trip got in several hours' worth of naps, so people were awake and energized when we went out to dinner :)
Tomorrow we've got a free afternoon, which Pong laoshi is going to use to take a group of people to the Temple of Heaven. Pictures of that will be posted once February rolls around, so look out for those. Until next time, readers!