Trip to Bei Hai Park today with Chelsea and our tutor. Well, first we grabbed some hot pot for lunch from one of my favorite restaurants here. Then, we had our first experience riding on a bus in Beijing today. It was super cheap, but I think I like the subways...there aren't traffic jams on the subway. We met a nice teacher from Ming Zi University who we were talking to during the ride. Chelsea convinced me to do a few magic tricks for the people on the bus. It was kinda nerve-wracking, but I managed ok. They were impressed. We ended up getting off the bus a few stops early and walking because the traffic was so bad. Finally arrived at the park....and it was packed with tourists traveling for the National Holiday. We were trying to get pictures of us with our tutor, but so many people kept butting in because they wanted to take pictures with us. After a while, we managed to escape and rented a pedal boat to ride around the lake. It was fun in the beginning....but then people started intentionally running into our boat to get our attention, which I thought was super super rude of them. One boat was just following us around shouting "hello" to get our attention. I've gotten good at ignoring these kind of people.

After we finally managed to park our boat and get off the lake, we walked around the park for a little. We saw people doing calligraphy with brushes and water on the sidewalk. Apparently this is common practice in China. Also, old people dancing in parks, but we didnt see any of that today. We walked around a bit more and then sat for a while to look at the lake and eat some fruit. Once again, we were pestered by groups of tourists wanting to take pictures with us. After a while, we had to get up and walk away because it was getting ridiculous.

Took the bus back to BeiDa....had to wait for forever for the one we needed to come. Grabbed some milk tea and pastries and then headed back to the dorm. Tried to start my homework, but I just wasn't in the mood. Went exploring with Elliot and tried out a Wang Ba (internet cafe), but none of my NA accounts work on the asian servers. It's kind of hard to set up stuff on the computers when everything is in Chinese. Back to the dorms and now time for sleep! Have to go shopping tomorrow to pick up last minute things for my trip and probably spend a lot of the day doing homework. I have such a headache from speaking Chinese all day. I'm still a little frustrated. I feel like my reading is improving, but my speaking and listening skills are going no where. Guess I need to start studying more. Leaving for my trip on Thursday, so I will not be online for the next 5 days. Updates to come after I return to Beijing. Can't believe I've already been in China for 1 month!! This semester is going wayyyyyy too fast!