Day 2

Wednesday we went to the zoo, which is right across the street from the hotel. It cost Y20 (little less than $3) to get in. The big draw was to see the Pandas, but it took us several hours of wandering to find them and they were sleeping and much smaller than I expected. One weird thing we encountered at the zoo was that they were playing the wedding march at the hippo cages. Not sure what that was about…

My allergies are acting up so I took the afternoon off from sightseeing while the others went to the Forbidden City. They told me that there is a Starbucks in the middle of the Forbidden City with “Art students from inner-Mongolia” selling their paintings. I guess this is a popular scam; the art is mass-produced but actually quite nice. So Starbucks has taken over the world. I’ve also seen a Wal-mart and an Ikea since I’ve been here, not to mention the World’s largest KFC.

We met up with this kid Joel whose Grandfather was on of our Emeritus Professors at ASU (our museum is named after him). Joel has been living here for 8 months studying and so is semi-fluent and is helping us get around the next few days before heading back to the State. So with the help of Joel all nine of us ventured outside the hotel for dinner and realized how much we get overcharged as foreigners in the hotel. The entire meal which included tea, beer, fish, soup, rice and at least four other dishes came to Y287, so ~$5 per person! I think I’m going to try to brave the real world for as much of the trip as possible