Being an Iconic Chinese Tourist

The CIEE program has been wonderful (albeit expensive) in that they plan lots of trips for us while we’re here. Almost every week, we have a place to go. We’ve been to the Peking Opera, an acrobatics show, Tiananmen Square, the summer palace, the temple of heaven, and the Forbidden City. We still have trips planned to the Great Wall and even out of town, to Henan for Shaolin Temple. They get us a bus and a tour guide so we are all set. It’s a lot of fun.

Beautiful girls! Annie, Susan, Allison and Erin

Yay for photo ops!

My favorites have been the summer palace and–as of this weekend–the Great Wall. I’d been to the summer palace last summer with my dad, but my friend told me that if there’s one place to go over and over again in Beijing, it’s the summer palace. He was right. I had an even better time. The weather was great and the palace was beautiful.

What’s crazy about Chinese tourist attractions is that there is just so much to see. The summer palace, for example, fits 44 full-length soccer fields. (That was the emperor’s equivalent of a “cottage up north”!). While there, we decided to be adventurous and climb up a little ways up a mountain–and ended up at a beautiful temple. How much greater can mindless wander get?

Then there are the random cultural acts that we see touring around. Senior citizens are the best examples of those. What to us is the Temple of Heaven is to them the park where they exercise every morning. Going into the entrance of the temple, we saw people writing water calligraphy on the ground. Inside the park, there was a large group of old women dancing (some of us joined in!) and an elderly couple playing ball. Some of us decided to practice the taichi we had just learned in front of the temple. Cultural immersion!

Since my dad came for a couple days’ visit, we decided to go to the Great Wall on Thursday (no classes). We went to Mutianyu, a part of the Great Wall that is a bit less touristy. It was a great call. The weather was amazing…there was even blue sky! There were a number of tourists there but definitely not too many. Some were intense hikers. They wore complete climbing gear and were part of an 8-day excursion. They climbed the wall every day and at night would climb down into a nearby mountain village to spend the night.

My dad and I were not quite so prepared. We had thankfully remembered to wear tennis shoes but we were both in jeans and a t-shirt. I had mistakenly assumed that most of the wall was just walking. Most of it was actually steep climbing on stairs! It was actually quite scary. We didn’t end up making it all the way. We stopped with about 2 towers left. There was a dance team climbing it together (next Wharton Leadership Venture, maybe?). My dad wants to bring the rest of his Logic staff here to do a teambuilding exercise. The view is definitely impressive. The higher you go, the better it is. Each next tower really was worth it.