Springtime at the Summer Palace

The large Buddhist temple at the center of the palace.

One of the many mythical guardians keeping watch.

My adorable roommate, Fu Li Na.

Me outside a rock garden.

Suzhou Street, a small town like place connected entirely by canals which are apparently

only fully operational during summer months.

Today we woke up to rain in Beijing. According to my roommate this is very rare during February and March. But as I am writing this at 5pm the rain persists and making everything damp, cold and just generally terrible. Now, I have nothing against rain. In fact, as a native Coloradan I usually seem to find it novel and exciting. However, today was our scheduled field trip to the Summer Palace, which presented some problems.

When we arrived at the Summer Palace around 10am it looked like the rain was going to let up. So we bought cheap little rain ponchos and preceded to explore the enormous compound. For those of you unfamiliar with the Summer Palace, it is an enormous compound of temples, gardens and royal residences. It sits outside Beijing on Kunming lake, and it is probably one of the most beautiful and generally impressive residences I have ever seen. It was most notably headquarters for the Empress Dowager Cixi during the late Qing dynasty, during the summer months.

At first I did not realize how large the compound was. I thought it would take no more than an hour to see everything. Yeah, I was definitely wrong. We walked around from 10am to 2pm and only saw about half of the compound. It was really amazing and the decent English captions made it pretty darn interesting. Fu Li Na also did a good job of explaining things to me. You have all most likely at some point seen pictures of the Summer Palace if you have ever picked up a travel guide or picture book about China, and now I understand why. The grandeur and scale of the place makes imagining people actually living in such incredible luxury difficult. It is also daunting when you consider the time period in which it was built. A good deal of it was actually closed for renovation, but I did get to see some rather interesting things. I saw the first automobile that was brought to China as a gift to the Empress Dowager. Sadly, tourists are not allowed to take photos of many of the most interesting artifacts.

The down side to all of this is that throughout the entire trip the rain did not let up for one second. While we were walking around and viewing things it was not much of a problem but when we got back into the tour bus all of us realized how incredibly soaked we were. It was a cold ride home. As soon as we got back to the dorm all the Chinese roommates raced to get into the shower. Apparently the common idea is that if you are cold and damp the best way to warm up is to take a shower. I don't know why but this first struck me as strange, but the more I think about it the more it actually makes sense.

Today my roommate taught me how to say, 'I wet my pants.' How's that for useful Chinese?