China - Day 12

Today we continued our more relaxed schedule. The majority of people did not do anything until about 3:00pm or so. I don't know what everyone did during the morning, but I can tell you what I did. Today was the day that the girls got to pick up their cloaks from the tailor. My mom, Mrs. Huang, Katrina and myself ended up going to get the cloaks. You may wonder why I went to go pick up cloths when I didn't even have anything to pick up. Well, this tailor makes suits, and I have wanted to get a new suit for awhile. I went to get a new suit.

This place we went to, to pick up the cloths was a building 4 stories high, and filled with cloth shops and tailors. There was a lot of raw cloth in that building. So, you could pick from any sort of wool, cashmere, or blend thereof to have made into some cloths. I'm not going to try and go into detail about this shopping for cloths. Suffice to say, I took awhile to pick some cloth, but did in the end, and am going to get two suits custom tailored. If you care to know what I got, one is a charcoal color with pinstripes, and the other is blue with blue'ish pinstripes. So, those should be done by the 20...about 3 days before we leave to Hong Kong I think.

We got back from that place at around 2:00 I think. We left at 11:00 and only spent 2 hours in the shop, which is how long we had said we would stay there. And by the way, my mom picked out a shirt to have knit, and she took a good deal of that time deciding what to get. So, I did not spend 2 hours trying to decide what cloth to get.

After we got back, we crammed 11 people into a seven seat van (we've had 13 in it before, so 11 wasn't that bad) and went to the Capital Museum of China. The reason we went to this museum is because China had taken many artifacts from all over China and put them in this museum for the Olympics. Today was the last day that many of these special exhibits would be open. So, we decided to go today. It was pretty interesting. Like many parts of China, the museum was extremely crowded. As we found out, it was really only the first floor that was crowded, but that had most of the temporary artifacts. Anyway, it was very had to get to look at exhibits and take pictures (yes, they did allow pictures) because it was so busy.

There are about 6 floors to the museum, and we looked at 3 of them, I think. They were closing, and that is why we had to go, but museums also get boring after a little bit. After that, we left for some dinner. We went to a Korean bar-ba-Q for dinner. We had some fried rice, soup, and beef. We had lots and lots of beef. The Koreans have the beef thing down, that stuff was really amazing. You are given a dipping sauce for the beef (I don't really know what it was. The base may have been soy sauce, with some vegetables to give flavor) and some lettuce to wrap the beef up in. So, that meal was a success.

We then headed to the Beijing National Centre for the Performing Arts. Sometimes referred to as "the Egg" the centre (misspelled on purpose by the way) is a big dome like building that looks like a egg lying on it's side, only half of the egg would be underground so you can only see half of it. The whole thing is surrounded by water, so it look sort of like an island. We went to a concert there put on by the CNR orchestra. I forget the exact pieces that were played, but I know that it was Beethoven, a violin concerto (the soloist was amazing), and Brahms. I'll get the specifics tomorrow. The concert was really good though. The hall is pretty cool. I wasn't allowed to take the camera in for the convert, but after the concert I was able to take some picture inside the "egg." I couldn't get back in the actual concert hall, but just the atrium area.

That just about sums up our day today. I don't really know what we are doing tomorrow. I heard something about going to the Forbidden City...but who knows? Oh, and we also just bought some train tickets to take us down to Jung Jo (wrong Pinyin I think, but that is what in sounds like) where my mom grew up. We'll be leaving Thur. night and traveling all night to get there in the morning. Alrighty, thanks all for reading!
-Aaron

A little of the outside of the museum

From China Day 12

Inside

From China Day 12

Terracotta Soldiers. They really are life size. It's cool to see them up close.

From China Day 12

You can't really see it well, but this is a jade suit sown together with gold. These things are expensive!

From China Day 12

There are a few more photos from the museum on the album.


The Egg at eye-level with the water.

From China Day 12

Our group inside the egg.

From China Day 12

Inside. This is like an atrium. Inside the egg there are three different halls that have performances. There is a concert hall, a opera house, and a theater. The place is really big.

From China Day 12