Eventful weekend

I packed in a lot of things because it’s the last non-Olympics weekend until the end of August. In some ways, it’s already not so normal; the Olympic Green is buzzing with activity and there is a noticeably higher number of visitors now.

On Friday evening, after a double session of tutoring, I went for a run down the street just north of my apartment complex and got to the Olympic Green in about 20 minutes. I took a much longer route the first time I ran there, not realizing that the street nearby runs at an angle directly to the Olympic media center, stadium, and Water Cube.

A lot more signs, fences, and barricades are up, not to mention hundreds of volunteers and some photographers and media trucks.

On Saturday morning I went to a dam in a steep river gorge near the Great Wall. Along with three other students, we rented a van and a driver for the day and drove out there on the cycling road race course. It is a really cool drive towards the mountains north of the city. We went by the Olympic Village and then up a winding highway towards the Great Wall. For whatever reason, our driver took the service road that runs along side the four-lane expressway. The road was lined with signs for the cycling race, workers were filing down the speed strips at each sharp corner, and the finish line was already up. It’s a great road for a race and the finish is at the top of a long and winding uphill.

At the Longqing Dam we took an escalator to get up and over the dam. It’s the largest dam in northern China and the only really big dam I’ve ever seen. Above the dam we hopped on a boat with a bunch of umbrella-wielding tourists and went on a slow ride that wound back and forth around steep mountain peaks. The water in the reservoir was a bright aquamarine and the sky was a deep blue color. It was beautiful.

And then all of us went bungee jumping, which was the highlight of the day. There was a long and narrow platform that extended from rock cliff out over the river and two bungee ropes and a motorboat that picked jumpers up once they stopped bouncing and ferried them back to tour boat dock.


We hiked some and then took a boat back to the dam, got back in the dam, and stopped at a place near the Badaling Great Wall, which is where Andy and I hiked around in March, took some pictures, drove further down the mountain, and then took more pictures near a section of the wall that was closed.

That night I meet a university student from Changzhou who was in town and took him and his friend to a cheap food court with tons of typical Beijing foods. It was a place that a local took me to once and I wanted to go back to try more of the local food.

On Sunday I spent five hours at the new Capital Museum, including one hour waiting in line. It was a Sunday and the museum had some new exhibits, so it was expectedly crowded, but this was extremely crowded, even by Beijing standards. When I finally got into the first exhibit, I couldn’t help but laugh because all I could see were clusters of people swarming displays and madly snapping pictures. I didn’t see much of anything in the first exhibit because they were obscured by too many heads and cameras. It wasn’t nearly as bad in other parts of the museum and I was able to see nearly all of it in four hours, including ancient Chinese painting, pottery, jewelry, calligraphy, a computer animated video of the history of the city, an exhibit on the ancient Greek Olympics, and a break eating a delicious buffet lunch.

I biked back to the Olympic Green Sunday night, which was even more crowded than it was on Friday, before finally getting down to studying later that night.

[UPDATE] more pictures are online.