Day 3 - Home of the Original Firework!

Happy 4th of July!

First - thanks for the comments!  Keep them coming if something interests you!  We all want to keep this as interactive as possible.

Lightening is flashing off the walls in my room this evening.  It's been raining since around 7PM.  We had some free time and I decided to catch up with some friends at a market, but couldn't find it and found myself right in the middle of a congested (lung and traffic) street.  I was turning back when a Caucasian guy burst through the crowd.  I knew immediately he was from my group.  We met just in the nick of time because the sky opened up - not sure if this was mother nature or an artificially-induced thunderstorm - and it started to rain...hard.  We both took shelter in a nearby dorm and waited it out.  This was an ending to a reasonably dry day.

My 4th of July this year was spent visiting media outlets.  As Matt mentioned earlier, we took a tour of The People's Daily - online department - and the Beijing Youth Daily.  It was interesting to see how each organization delivered their news product.  The People's Daily really had a large gathering of journalists that grabbed stories and photos numbering in the hundreds of thousands.  The recent earthquake coverage really tested the organization, but they had an impressive show of information up quickly on their website.  The Beijing Youth Daily markets a plethora of magazines/newspapers geared towards a variety of age groups.  We toured some of the building, but most of what we saw was empty.  Our guide noted the employees usually show up from early evening.  Things get really busy around midnight.

(Man is using Adobe Premiere software!)

Lunch was quite different.  

We showed up at a ritzy establishment that had buffet-style ordering.  Many of us bypassed the Fish-Head soup and settled for the fried chicken and dumplings.  I tried some yellow watermelon and some carrot (or some kind of root) flavored ice cream that was the color purple.  

It was not bad but I don't think Ben and Jerry's should adopt it as a new flavor.

In the evening, a couple of friends and I went down the main strip and found an authentic Chinese restaurant - and I mean authentic.  Menu items ranged from fried eels to pig intestine.  We were not brave enough to try those dishes, but we ordered a shrimp dish, dumplings, pork (not sure how i was prepared) fried rice and drinks.  We split the meal and we each paid 24 yuan - about 3 dollars.  Our server was very confused because Cliff, an American who's lived in China a couple of months, knew enough Chinese to get us through the ordering process, but when a communication breakdown happened the server would look at me as if I knew the right translation.  In a very awkward and sheepish gesture I tried to motion I didn't know anything she was saying.  Maybe she thought I was a mute?  Ah, yet another interesting encounter!

Tomorrow, we are doing what we know how to do best - sightseeing!  The MO includes a trip to the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace!  Looking forward to this.

Below is a recap of our day through video - Mark shows us the traffic right outside Renmin University, I explain our media trips and a look at our first thunderstorm in Beijing...no fireworks though.

Video is having trouble posting - try back later!

Ted