a picture from the park at the old Summer Palace

Today is our last full day in China and I’m not ready to leave. We had class in the morning that was a little more interesting than yesterday’s class because it was all about family life in China, both ancient customs and modern customs. After the lecture, we presented our business plan for China. My group designed a product called the T-bottle. It is a bottle that both filters and boils your water for you (because the tap water here isn’t safe to drink) so you can drink it. It also has a removable filter that you can put tea leaves in to make hot tea. I know, the logistics of it are a little iffy, but all we had to do was make something Chinese people could use and market it to the Chinese. We didn’t actually have to design a real product. After the presentations were over, we went to the old Summer Palace that had been burnt down by the British in the 1800’s. There used to be two until the British burnt this one down. The Chinese still don’t really care for the British because of that. All I wanted to see were the ruins of the palace, but most of it has been turned into a park, and the part of it that did have ruins cost extra to go see. I am running low on Yuan so I didn’t go in. I did get one picture from outside the gate. Getting a taxi back to the hotel was a little harder than we thought it would be. Nobody would pick us up. When we finally did get back, it was time to go to our farewell dinner. At dinner, we had another one of those lazy susan style dinners, just like we had the first night. It was a lot more fun than the first night probably because we all knew each other a lot better, or because we were a lot more comfortable with Chinese culture, or maybe even both. We were all sad that this would be the last meal we eat together, but it was very good. This meal rivaled the Peking duck. After the dinner, we went back to the hotel and just hung out. I don’t want to leave tomorrow, but we had a good run here in Beijing. I have had a lot of fun and I hope to revisit China in the future.