Streets of Beijing

One of my friend’s uncle took us to a really good traditional Beijing hot pot. It was delicious. The day before I came, my friends had had dinner at a Peking duck place they couldn’t stop talking about how good it was. So now I have to go back to Beijing some weekend to try the duck.

Beijing’s oldest post office with Daniel and James

Beijing’s oldest bridge

We also visited a couple of street foods where they sold the most bizarre things

I’m curious to know how you eat a starfish. I thought it was all a shell.

Anyone hungry? Longhorns, spider kings, sheep penis, centipedes, pupae….

The scorpions were quite popular and they were still MOVING!!!!!!! >< I don’t think I could ever be able to eat that.

what I did try was chou tofu (stinky tofu) and it wasn’t too stinky. It tasted almost like regular tofu. Stinky tofu is a form of fermented tofu. From wikipedia, “The traditional method for producing stinky tofu is to prepare a brine made from fermented milk, vegetables, and meat; the brine can also include dried shrimp, amaranth, greens, mustard greens, bamboo shoots and Chinese herbs. The brine fermentation can take as long as several months.” You can just imagine how smelly it is! You can smell from very far.

There was some kind of street mob in front of a church. Old people, young people, everyone was dancing and apparently they do this almost every night.

James hiding, Steve, Daniel and me

I enjoyed Beijing a lot even though it was only for a day. So far I liked it a lot more than Tianjin, there’s simply so much more to do. I will definitely be visiting again!

The Summer Palace (Beijing I)

On Sunday I left Tianjin really early to meet up with some friends from Tech in Beijing. We had a greaat time! We walked so much everywhere by the end we couldn’t even feel our feet. First we visited the summer palace. It was huge! I don’t think we were even able to see 1/4 of it. It wasn’t only that it was huge, it was also uphill so there were lots of steep stairs.

This is how huge and spread out the palace is.

more pictures (The Summer Palace) VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

For snacks they sell cucumbers, sweet potato and steamed corn. How healthy! Compare to pretzels, hot dogs, chips and caramelized apples back in the US.

After the Summer Palace, we went to the Olympic area. First the bird’s nest…Inside the nest! It doesn’t look as big in the picture but it was HUGE!! It was amazing how enormous it seemed.

inside the cube! My favorite part was the ceiling and walls.

Rainbow sausage, hahaa just though it was funny

and this

This post is getting too long, I’ll do a Beijing Part II~!

Liu Yuan

Sorry I got lost! classes started at the speed of light since we only have 9 weeks. It’s only been a few days but I feel like it’s been weeks! So much has been going on. I don’t even know where to catch up with.

So I think I’ll start with the weekend. That first day I went to the cafeteria I met some people from Tianjin University because they were curious to know where I was from. They invited me to this international event at the University. It was somewhat like a fair and they had booths from all different countries and there were people from all over talking Chinese. It was odd. I guess now I know how people feel when they’re surprised I really do speak Spanish and not Chinese.

My friend Li!

They were also selling food from all the different countries. When I was around the Vietnam booth a lady came to me and asked me if I wanted to try a spring roll and gave me some chopsticks. I was eating the roll and I noticed she was speaking to a microphone very fast in Chinese and there was a camera in front and then she gave me the microphone and I just stood there looking at the camera thinking “whaaat?” and then I said, “Dui bu qi, bu hui shuo zhongwen! (Sorry, I don’t speak Chinese)” The lady asked me where I was from and I said, “Banama ren (Panamanian)” and then she turned again to the camera and said, “Banama ren shuo hen hao chi (Panamanian said it was delicious)” Lol.

Here are some pictures from around the campus! Tianjin University is said to have one of the biggest campus. There are (I think) a total of four lakes.So many bicycles everywhere! which reminds me of crossing a street in China!!! It’s crazy! There’s everything coming at you, cars, bicycles, motorcycles and all kinds of three-wheeled vehicles. Vehicles (excluding cars) don’t follow traffic lights and even cars sometimes don’t follow the lights either! Whenever I’m on a taxi I feel my heart is going to jump out.

A friend from Tianjin told me they turn off the lights at 11 pm everywhere so people have to go to sleep. I couldn’t believe it! That is really early in GT time. They were shocked by the fact that our library back at Tech is open 24 hours during finals and exam times.

This is our one and only classroom for the program.

Instant Noodles

On Friday the program organized a field trip. We went to an instant noodle museum. Lol. I was really curious to see what it was going to be like. The company was Master Kong Noodles (Kong Shifu). They are China’s #1 leading brand of instant noodles! Apart from noodles, they also produce crackers and drinks. I’ve only tried their green tea but I have yet to try their noodles.

It was so funny, they even had a mini train!

This is were the noodles are shaped, stretched and then put into individual molds.

They are sprinkled with water and something that I think the lady said “soap” but I’m not sure. She said this was to add flavor so the noodles by themselves are not so tasteless. Then they are fried in the molds and come out the way you can see in the image above.

then comes packaging

This robotic arm was very cool and smart. Being among Tech students rather than admire the arm, a dispute arose on how the code was written to program it and what platform was used. Only at Tech.

I had to take a picture of this trash can. Rubbish receptacle = trash can ^^

After the tour we had a delicious meal at a seafood restaurant since that area of Tianjin is famous for its seafood.