Zoo and the Old Summer Palace

太好了！Yes! Finally I have Chinese characters reinstalled on my laptop! It's hard to explain how much of a pain this was. But hey! Now I can read all the lurid messages my Chinese-speaking friends were leaving in the comments.

I'd also like to welcome all of the PHS students and staff now stopping in to visit my blog! Hope your semester's gotten off to a promising start, and I'm looking forward to reading your comments.

As promised below, I've gotten those pictures from the old Summer Palace and the Beijing Zoo up on my Flickr page. Here are the zoo pictures, and here are the old Summer Palace shots.

The zoo was pretty run-of-the-mill, except, of course, for the pandas. They were just about as adorable and lazy as I could ever have hoped. It's a bit ironic, actually: the names of their homes are the Asian Games Panda House and Olympic Games Panda House, despite the fact that these were, by far, the most lethargic creatures in the zoo. In a way, the Beijing Zoo really impressed me. I was expecting 'animal jail' given the PRC's previous environmental policies. But generally the place was well-kept, and the animals seemed to have adequate living conditions. The tigers were a sad exception. Really small pens, extremely close human contact, and obvious stress on the creatures, including one tiger clawing at the back door to get out... No good.

On Friday after class, a buddy of mine and I went to the old Summer Palace. This was the Summer Palace of the Qing emperors up until 1860, when an expeditionary British and French army marched in destroyed it almost entirely. What they didn't destroy, they left for the Eight-Power Alliance to annihilate when they came through to put down the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Not a shining moment in European or Chinese history, this.

To remind the Chinese of the 'national humiliation' at the hands of the Western imperialists, the Chinese government has not restored any of the previous buildings that once stood there. In their place are just the stone foundations, and a placard explaining what used to stand there. Needless to say, this place is kinda eerie. No buildings in sight (except for a food stand here and there), very few tourists, and a heavy fog all combined to form a pretty somber scene.

On a brighter note, this weekend I buy the few things I need to take with me to Yunnan the week after next! This is going to be a really exceptional trip. Yunnan is one of China's most southern provinces, backing up against Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar to the south, and Tibet to the northwest. IES has been working this program for long enough that our program director has built something of a rapport with the local Tibetans there. As such, we get to spend a couple of nights living in their homes and sharing meals with them. Very excited about this. Apparently, we're going to be doing quite a bit of hiking, too, which is just up my alley. Once I know more, I'll be posting again. Wish you all well!

EDIT: For those who want to send snail mail, you can send letters to this address. Both the English and Chinese addresses have to be on the letter, side-by-side, for it to arrive, since most mailmen from China don't speak English, and most American mailmen don't read Chinese...

IES Abroad Beijing
PO Box 138
4th Floor, No 7 Building
Beijing Foreign Studies University
19 North Xisanhuan Avenue
Haidian District
Beijing, 100089, China

_______________________________

IES Abroad 北京中心
北京海淀区西三环北路19号
北京外国语大学院7号喽4层 （138 信箱）
邮编 100089