Fragrant Hill was our tourist destination today. It was about 30 minutes outside of the city. It was basically a park located on the side of a mountain. There were some really nice buildings, ponds and flowers at the bottom of the mountain. The trail we took up the mountain was really neat too. It had a nice zigzag pattern, which made the uphill climb a little more bearable. It took about 50 minutes for us to get to the top, but the view was worth the hike. Through the haze, you could see pretty much all of Beijing. We stayed at the top for a half an hour or so then decided to head back down. Going down only took us about 20 minutes, because we were running pretty fast.
For lunch, we went to a famous duck restaurant. I must say, duck tastes pretty good. I just didn’t like when they brought out the head for us to eat the brains. I did not try the brain. The rest of the meal was good. After lunch, we went back to the first market that we went to in order to get some cheap souvenirs. The main point of the trip was for a group of people to eat scorpions from one of the street vendors. There were a decent amount of people in the group and they all tried the scorpion, except for me. The scorpions were living right before they cooked them so it just wasn’t going to happen for me.
That night, we went to Tsinghua University to visit with some of their students and talk about various things to get a better understanding of our different cultures. I was a buddy with a girl named Lisa. She was really nice. We talked about School and things that we like to do on our free time. Surprisingly, they were pretty similar. I expected our cultures to be extremely different, but this once again shows me that they are pretty much just like American college kids (with a little less of the partying).