Day 5- Summer palace

This day was pretty relaxed for us. There was not much to do but wander around a huge palace. I don't think we even made it to the main part of the palace because the place is so huge. There is a river surrounding the palace, and you can take boat rides around. We decided that instead, we would climb the hill and go on a boat ride across the lake on the other side. The view was incredible, and the palace spectacular. 

This place was so large that we could not get the whole
thing in the picture, this is only the first steps.

The architecture here was pretty amazing

This is made out of bamboo! The guy was making dragons
and flowers and all sorts of stuff. It was neat to watch.

This was a man making pitures out of words. Chinese or English. It was awesome to watch him work with such fluency.

This was the boat that we took across the river where
there was an island.

A guy followed us and made this for Jon. It is supposed to be
a portrait with the date, and summer palace written on the side.
We were shocked and we thought it was funny, so we
bought the plate from him. I'm not sure we will bring it home,
however it is a great likeness to Jon.

The island that was mentioned before.

We thought that these were pretty cool. We thought that they would only be 50 RMB to take and we would get to keep the photos. They were tricky though, as they are in China, and they duped us into taking two poses and charging us 50 for each pose. We were upset that they tricked us, but we were still glad that we experienced royal clothing.

 

We really enjoyed the summer palace and all of the weird things that happened to us there. We even enjoyed the very long walk home because of the wrong exit that we took that led us to a totally different subway station than the one that we got off of. We found out the hard way that tickets that you buy at one station will not work for all stations. Luckily it is low cost to get a new ticket, it was an adventure getting back on our own like that though. Asking people where the subway is without them speaking English is very interesting. You have to mime a lot of things, and that is one that is very tough. We made it though, and we were glad to experience another full day in Beijing.