Alyssa Parker

6/20/11

Blog Post #12

The four of us spent the whole day together on Sunday- first we went to see Mao Zedong’s body. They have preserved it in a mausoleum for 35 years now.  You get in a line of people going to pay their respects to Mao, and you walk through this silent room where his body is on display. I get that he is the founder of the Chinese Communist Party, and I understand that different cultures do different things. I asked a girl in my office very diplomatically what she thought of Mao’s body being on display- she said “hen qiguai.” (it’s very weird.) So, I don’t feel entirely bad saying yes, I think it’s extremely strange to be worshipping Mao’s body 35 years after he died. But, to each his own I guess.

Next, we went to the Lama temple in central Beijing to see the Buddhist monks. I felt really odd being in there, as it’s really a place where Buddhists go to pray. It would be like going into a church in the US and taking pictures during a mass. So, I felt like we shouldn’t be intruding in on their praying time. Then after that we found a pretty sweet restaurant next to it, and it said they have dumplings. Problem is, there are  6 words for dumplings in Chinese, and apparently I was saying the wrong ones. The waitress said they didn’t have any dumplings- then we saw the table next our table order them, so we were like aha! You DO have them. Turns out, after all of that, the dumplings weren’t that good anyway.

Finally, we went to a market that sells a whole bunch of different things. They have little stalls over 7 floors of stuff selling things like purses, shoes, clothes, jewelry, etc. Before we went, Ashley made it sound like it was going to be mass chaos- I envisioned a zillion people (I mean, it’s China- there are a zillion people everywhere) screaming at each other over prices, running through the aisles like Supermarket Sweep, jumping over stalls, and crazed old ladies grabbing us to sell us stuff. This was not exactly the case. Yes, it was really loud and there were a lot of people, but it wasn’t the mass hysteria I thought it would be. We discovered Dmitri has a hidden talent- haggling. For example, he somehow managed to get things down from around 800 yuan to like 40. Personally, I really hate haggling because vendors start yelling at you most of the time and tell you that you are crazy, and then I cave too soon, and it’s just a mess. Dmitri really took care of that end of it for the 3 girls. Overall, it was a long day, but fun to see all of the interesting and different things that go on in China.

Not related to anything in this blog post, I have posted some pictures of my office too to show what it looks like- it’s on the 41^st floor and the view is really nice on a clear day. Most days in Beijing are really foggy due to the pollution.

Internship location