I woke up at 6:45am today to catch the bus to visit the Summer Palace, or Yiheyuan (颐和园). This is one of the many weekend tours that the program arranges for the students, which is great because everything is paid for, but waking up at such an unholy hour on a weekend is never easy. Besides the getting up early part, the tour was fun. Sitting on the outskirts of Haidian district, the Summer Palace is essentially an amusement park built for Chinese royalty, a place for them to chill out in the summer. It became a park for the public when the last emperor was thrown off the throne.
The size of the place just shows the overindulgence of the royal families. It must have been amazing to have such a place to yourself. Imagine what kind of parties you could throw in there. You could have boat races on the gigantic lake. And if you ever got tired of walking in the garden, just get carried around on one of those sedan chairs. Anyway, enough daydreaming. If anyone actually owned that property today, they would probably rent it out or develop on it, turning the place into another mall or apartment complex. Its a good thing that the Chinese government has preserved the place as a historical landmark for us tourists to scope out.
This was actually my second time there, but for some reason, I appreciated the place a lot more. Last time it was just a stroll through the park with the madre and some relatives, nice and relaxing but nothing too exciting. This time, it was a return to the same place but the walk was a lot less lame. Everything I saw seemed new and fascinating to me, either because I have a terrible memory or because I've grown new eyes.
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