Day 1 & 2

Day 1

I arrived in the new airport terminal and was met by 3 chinese students. We took a bus to the other terminal to pick someone else up. After a good amount of time on the Subway, we made it to the forest of apartment buildings.

We waited for a key and then went up to the 28^th (top) floor. The apartment was clean, but hot and was missing a few things. We needed keys, internet, food, water, and more beds. I was the first one in the apartment to arrive. I sat around as a small army of Chinese fixed and cleaned everything.

I decided to go downstairs to see if anything was going on and my timing was perfect because a group of about 30 people had just arrived for the program. My friend Peter from Pitt was in the group, so I took him up to our apartment. We hung out for a while and waited for the third person to arrive while still putting everything together.

Derek, the third guy, arrived a little later and we found out that our leader, Thomas, wouldn’t be arriving until tomorrow. We hung around and then went to another building to someone’s apartment to go out for the night.

After looking for a while, we found the apartment and found that it was huge, with 10 people living in it. We collected everyone and went out to the main bar strip. We decided to meet up at Shooter’s, but no one told us specifically where it was. We probably did 3 massive circles before we found it. The night was really fun, running into random people from the program. One interesting thing that happened was at a place called Disco Pub. This place was great, playing my kind of music. There were poles on the stage, so eventually a dancer showed up. It was entertaining, nothing too raunchy. When the girl was done, a guy took the stage! We didn’t dare to look, but the funny part was that he was really good. He put the girl to shame. It was awkward, but funny as hell. The rest of the night was a few more bars and me messing up my knee on a railing. We got home around 5am.

Day 2

We woke up around noon because someone was knocking on the door. After talking for a while, we lazed around and eventually went out to eat at 2pm. We ordered 4 different dishes, all spicy, except for the dumplings. There was a vege dish, pork, and fish (which they brought out to us before they started). All I have to say about real Chinese food is amazing! Everything was delicious. The pork dish was pork belly, I’m pretty sure, and it was incredible. It was soft and spicy and just melted in your mouth. The fish was really good, but really bony. They forgot about our dumplings, but we didn’t really need them. After lunch we had a meeting about the opening ceremony and what we were doing.

We left for the ceremony at 6pm (Thomas arrived just as we were leaving) and made our way with our Chinese guide to a massive park. We went to a viewing stage, which is two massive screens setup in a square for Beijingers to watch the events. It was really full and the ceremony started at 8pm sharp. The first part was awesome, but sitting through all the countries, etc. was boring. We also hadn’t eaten anything else, so we were really hungry.

After it finally ended around 12:30am, we found our group of party goers from last night and decided to go back out. We spent about 20 min trying to hail a cab, and eventually gave up and took the subway. We met up in a Mexican bar and I immediately ordered a large burrito. One of the other guys ordered quesadillas, which came out rather quickly. After waiting 20 min, we asked about our food to find out that the kitchen said they had served us already. We were pissed, we hadn’t eaten in 9 hours and I wanted to kill the waiter. After being adamant about not getting our food, it finally came out. These burritos were huge, putting even chipotle to shame (only on size though). I finished mine and the other two stared in amazement. We left the bar and ran into everyone, then going to bar blu. I wasn’t in the mod to drink, being really full but still pissed off. After a beer, we decided to go home and sleep.