A Visit to Beijing Part 1

Last weekend, my family traveled to Beijing while my Dad participated in a teacher conference there. Saturday was our first full day in Beijing, and Mom took us to a famous art district, full of fascinating, little art galleries. Bright, vibrant graffiti covered brick walls lining the streets. I am a personal fan of graffiti, so it was especially fun for me to see it everywhere. After spending the morning walking through streets full of art, Michael, Jessie and I went on to a place called the “Zoo Market”. Taxiing there, we arrived quickly and then spent the afternoon shopping, and eating cheesecake-Oreo blizzards at Dairy Queen. In conclusion to the fun that we had together, we had to fight to get home. By fight I truly mean, “fight”. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of leaving at the busiest time of the day, rush hour. In China, rush hour is more like crowd, push and tumble hour. That particular metro line was closed, but I don’t know why because we could not read the sign. As a result, there were hoards of people everywhere, so we decided to bus home. However, after watching the back of the bus drive away three times, and running after it at top speed down the road only to find it too packed to accept any more people, we decided to take one that was headed to Tienanmen square (from there, we would try to take the metro). While standing (more like continually falling) in the bus, we saw that it would take no less than TWENTY stops to arrive. At this point we made a very unwise decision to get off at a random intersection, in order to find a taxi. We thought that because we were in a less crowded area, taxis would be more common, this was very naive thinking though. Our hopes were peaked thrice before a long awaited empty taxi finally agreed to take us. Our journey took two long hours from start to finish, it was an adventure to remember!

This was the entrance to the art sreets. (Michael, Jessie, and I are holding up the hand motions for each number)