July 5th - Palace of Discovery

Another interesting and fun-filled day in Beijing. What was different though was that we didn't have classes today. No weekend classes! We all ate breakfast at our regular time, which was around 7:00 and then went back to our dorms and prepared to go to the Summer Palace. We took a rented bus and arrived at the Summer Palace after 40 minutes. We saw amazing buildings and walked around a little bit with our tour guide, who was really nice and spoke very good English. The gates of the Summer Palace were just amazing and just the culture and the people amazed us. We walked down a corridor that held 4,000 paintings and climbed all the way to the top of the Palace where the Emperor stayed at. Of course we had fun along the way and bonded more over the experience. What was great and truly amazing about today was the fact that we got to take a boat back into the city on the same route that the Emperor took when his family and himself headed back from the Summer Palace. On the boat ride back, we were able to interact with some people on the boat, practice what little Mandarin we learned and waved to people from the boat. All in all, another wonderful day that we fully enjoyed!