Saturday, June 9th-Summer Palace and Peking Duck

• Red Bean Cake for breakfast
• I didn’t even know it when I ordered it (which is the third time this happened in China) because I thought I ordered a regular bread roll but I’m glad I did
• It was kind of like comedian Mitch Hedberg’s take on pancakes, “Man when you first eat into it you’re like ‘this is awesome!’ but by the end you’re f’n sick of them”

• • After a while you are like this is too much and luckily it’s small so you’ll be able to take one
• Beijing has an awesome subway
• On the red line that I was on (which is one of the busiest hence its name “Line 1”) I thought that getting to the Summer Palace from Tiananmen Square would be horrible because that subway car smelled really bad
• I think those Axe promotional girls that hand out the free body spray in America could have had a field day there
• But then I got on the blue line and I have to say that Beijing has probably the nicest subway system I’ve ever been on
• The blue line had really good a/c 
• In fact I hovered around this girl who was sitting down for 15 minutes not  because I’m creepy but because that just happened to be the spot with enough a/c power to blow the smell from the red line away from my mind
• And they have a digital real-time light indicators to tell you where you’re going and where the subway car has gone
• I would have taken a picture, but I probably would have been robbed
• Every minute or so there was a PA on the tv screen in there advising you to guard your belongings and seeing that every 3 minutes or so I pulled out my huge, “Look at me I’m a super obnoxious tourist” map of Beijing  I didn’t feel like calling more attention to myself than necessary
• Summer Palace
• This is definitely not a place meant for old people (but that’s only if you enter through the north gate)
• Because I didn’t want to spend a lot for a taxi, I just took the subway and that drops you off at the north gate which has a mountain that would definitely not be ADA compliant in the United States
• I just remember having to hike up that mountain to get to the summer palace and once again to get out and I was sweating through my shirt both times 
• The Summer Palace was really awesome
• It was a nice place to take a stroll but once again I was a victim of my own early bird as even the Summer Palace isn’t impervious to Beijing’s morning smog

• Got to see the Olympic Stadiums (Crow’s Next and Bubble Aquarium)
• I like the irony in that the street that leads up to them is called the “Beijing environmental street of Chanyong” but it’s covered in smog

• Finally tried Beijing Duck
• I couldn’t find anyone staying at the hostel to eat with me as I was staying in a single (and I’m not that social) and I didn’t feel like asking a group of strangers because with my Chinese my words might not convey what I want, so I just tried some by myself
• Turns out that if you don’t want to eat until the next Ice Age then this is perfect for you
• I didn’t realize that eating an entire duck fills you up quite a bit but it was totally worth it, it was my favorite part of being in Beijing
• I decided to try eating it at a nice restaurant
• I knew I found that nice restaurant when they wanted 10 RMB for a can of coke but one of those usually costs 3 RMB
• It was strange, it was 128 RMB to take it out but for the privilege of eating it in the restaurant they wanted 196 RMB
• So me being cheap, I figured that I’ll get it take out, go to some unoccupied restaurant where I can avoid the shame of eating by myself/being cheap and eat it there
• I found myself an empty restaurant, bought the cheapest thing I could find, and ate my duck there

• • I did have leftovers
  • I couldn’t eat the legs because I was so full so I just thought I would give them to a hobo
  • It’s actually really hard to find a hobo in Beijing, if I were in Atlanta I could just toss the bag into a park and find 6 of them but here in Beijing I couldn’t find a single hobo
  • I just gave it to a group of old people playing a weird game of cards and they seemed happy about it
• This is my future dream buidling
• I'll probably never become a multi-billionaire (I'll be happy getting to five-figures in USD) but if I do I want my skyscraper to look like the CCTV tower

• Found the American Embassy in case I need it
• I would have taken photos but I have this feeling that if I did I might have my camera taken away because taking pictures of embassies looks pretty sketchy
• Foreign Legion quarter is a great place to be caught in a rain storm
• I thought about just waking here and I saw the sky get darker but because Beijing had a lot of smog that day I couldn’t see any dark clouds or anything so I thought it was just turning into night
• Then I saw lightning bolts and I thought, “Oh Boy”
• Luckily I made it out dry thanks to the super long boulevard of trees in the middle of the street which is actually really nice
• Found another awesome shirt while walking in Beijing
• It's supposed to mean, "I heart Beijing" but this is what you get when you don't hire a foreign slang consultant

• Got to see taking the flag down in Tienanmen Square
• It was cool because there were a lot of plains clothes cops that were completely obvious (like a guy in a plane white t-shirt and jeans just casually walking around with a walkie-talkie plus these two dudes standing right next to the guards (the one guy's shirt says, "I love to eat veggies")

• The actual flag taking down ceremony was really cool too
• The soldiers all marched at exactly the same time with exactly the same length of footstep and I think they were all the same height
• I started taking a movie of it but I was so far away that it wasn't worth it and if you take a video then you miss out on the cool stuff