Work work work

Ok, so... things that have happened recently... well, we went to the MuTianYu section of the Great Wall last weekend (on my birthday!). It was pretty, even though it was one of the more rebuilt sections. The really fun part was the luge-slide on the way down. Basically, you sit on a little seat that has runners on the bottom and there's a handbrake and you just.... slide down this metal pathway. It's... possibly the least safe thing ever. Especially when you've got a plan to go really fast down most of it that involves stalling so that the slow people in front of you get a good head start and then whizzing down (past the men who are hired to sit along the path and yell at people for going too fast or too slow) until you have to stop and wait for them to go again.

There was a group of adults who took a baby on this ride. I found this horrifying.

We also were supposed to take a trip to a museum that ended up being closed, so we ended up in Jingshan park, which is right behind the forbidden city. It's always really beautiful to look at the contrast between the forbidden city architecture and the modern Beijing around it.

We leave on Thursday to go to Nanjing and Shanghai for the weekend and then begin our week of freedom. I'm going with a group that's staying an extra night in Shanghai, then travelling to Hangzhou and then North to Xi'an before we head back to Beijing. It should be fun. I won't have my computer with me, so I'll have to wait to post about it. I hope I have enough room in my camera for all the pictures I'll want to take...

Ok, time to go back to working on my paper. I'll upload some pictures later, since I'll probably be in this cafe for a while and will want another study break.