July 22- Day 9

In regards to last night, we had just finished Tai Chi class when Matt, Kevin and I decided to play around and workout on the pull up bars outside our classroom. Matt and Kevin did a series of pull-ups, much more than I could ever dream of, and after a series of pushups, we were all tired. A fellow Californian named Russell came out of the classroom and challenged Matthew to a duel in monkey madness. This ‘monkey’ Russell started his routine of scratching himself and picking the bugs out of his hair. After this ritual was finished, he ate his banana and quickly twirled and twisted around the bars. Matthew, due to his amazing competitive spirit, decided to return to the bars and imitate this monkey king. Unfortunately, the rain had moistened the bars, and our buddy lost his hold (due to the lack of a tail), and fell to the concrete jungle floor.

            Initially, the onlookers merely thought he had a bloody nose, but upon further inspection in the lighted dorms, we noticed that he looked like Owen Wilson. This buddy of ours, we now knew, was much stronger than any monkey alive; he was in fact a king. He felt no pain.      Until his nose started throbbing. He was quickly rushed to the Beijing University Hospital, where his monkey queen’s father gives yearly lectures. One of the parents of a No. 4 High School student is a bone doctor at this hospital, so our king received the ultimate treatment. Our king demands the best, and he even asked this doctor for his doctorate credentials.

            After 30 minutes and an X-ray for our Liu ‘King King,’ he returned to his castle to tell his subjects the diagnosis. His subjects all breathed a sigh of relief that their king would continue his rule, and they all departed for their wooden bunks.

 

Day 9 started with all of us checking on Liu Kang Kang to see that he was okay. We had a quick breakfast of eggs, bread with filling stuff, and mangosteens (… google it). Matthew decided to stay home and rest for the day to allow the swelling to go down, so Mackenzie, Kevin, Lil’ Chungsta and I left our domain for Qianmen Shopping Street. We visited many clothing shops, including Uniqlo where we purchased shirts. Among these we bought a Harry Potter shirt for Matthew; upon our arrival at PEK, a Chinese student immediately recognized him as our magical friend. More window shopping ensued, and we finally sat down to eat lunch at Gou Bu Li Bao Zi for a tasty meal of 40 meat filled buns, 8 soup dumplings, and 1 plate of nutritious greenery. We ran back to meet our group and headed on towards Tianmen Square. We took many pictures, and I got to play soccer with 2 six year old boys using a water bottle. I won.

Our tour guide bought us all some terrible popsicles that kept the heat off our minds, and we entered our demise, the FORBIDDEN CITY (: o)... Kevin and I were quite bored of the city because we had visited this beautiful area recently, so we decided to sit and talk in a café, while we listened to music and ate ice cream. The first half of the day was very enjoyable, and I will now pass the keyboard off to Mackenzie so that she can recount her experience at the Forbidden City. This program is almost over, many volunteers have already departed, and I am going to soon begin my English teaching in Guanxi, a southern province.

 

 

HI. Mackenzie here. Soooo…my computer apparently deleted the page and a half that I wrote about an extremely memorable day at the Forbidden City. More to come…later.

 

Now, we are all really tired from a full day, but instead of napping, I have to rewrite this blog post that failed so miserably yesterday. So back to the story. While Mark and Kevin were relaxing café side, listening to music and licking their ice cream cones, Zhong Laoshi and I frantically searched for them after realizing that they were no longer beside us en route to the main palace. Rather than seeing their happy and relaxing faces, Zhong Laoshi and I were greeted by throngs of annoying tour guides and sweaty tourists all wearing matching accessories. No sign of Kevin or Mark. We eventually decided that they were smart kids and would be able to find their own way to the opposite end of the Forbidden City at the end of the day. Zhong Laoshi apparently loves the place and she gladly showed me around some of her favorite parts such as the emperor’s throne, the “Hall of Mental Cultivation”, the living quarters of the concubines, and the room reserved especially for the emperor and his wife. We tried to notify our ice cream eating friends of our meeting place using the Forbidden City loud speaker system. There were three pitfalls with this ingenious idea. First, the rude lady wouldn’t let either of us actually use the paging system. Second, the lady that did use the paging system didn’t speak English. Three, the lady that used the paging system said, “Chu Kai Wen” and “Luo Wu Jie” (Kevin and Mark’s Chinese names) with a bunch of rapid fire Chinese in a barely audible voice. Really now?! As Zhong Laoshi and I finished our self-guided tour, we passed through the imperial Garden and marveled at the ancient and gnarled trees as well as the man-made mountain of rocks made in China. We exited the Forbidden City to learn that some of the student volunteers had already told Mark and Kevin when and where to meet. Soon, our happy family was reunited, and we boarded the bus to go back to school.  15 minutes after returning to the school, Chungsta, Mark, and I went to the auditorium for “Lectures and practice of Chinese Painting and the tie-dye producing,” a class in which we randomly bunched cloth with rubber bands and dipped it in blue dye and tried our hands at paper cutting. Kevin, on the other hand, got to go to a special hot pot dinner with one of the student volunteers and his girlfriend. We then enjoyed a dining hall dinner and then headed back to the auditorium for “Lectures and practice of Chinese calligraphy.” We discovered that Mark has an amazingly well-hidden talent for calligraphy because all of his strokes are, in the words of the teacher, “very powerful.” Zhong Laoshi on the other hand…well let’s just say she can’t even remember how to write Kevin or Mark’s Chinese names correctly. After the class, the calligraphy teacher reluctantly gave Zhong Laoshi and I some of his calligraphy work (which he normally charges for…)

            And that was it for our second to last full day. We went back to the dorms, nestled comfortably in our hard wood board bunk beds, and dreamed of delicious crab-filled buns.