On my third day in Beijing, Boba and I went to the Summer Palace!!!! We were both super excited; we were also supposed to visit Tian'amen Square and the Forbidden City, but it was SO hot and we both had seen enough! We just wanted to relax after the Summer Palace.
Boba and I woke up around 10 am to eat before we left. I didn't know if there were any decent food options around the Summer Palace, so I wanted to make sure we wouldn't get hungry. The last thing you want to deal with is intense hunger, crazy heat, and expensive prices.
We walked to the DongSiShiTiao station and transferred to Line 4 at XiZhiMen. Then we got off at BeiGongMen which wasn't too far from the Summer Palace. The Beijing subway system is super easy to navigate and very affordable at 2 kuai per ride.
We did have some interesting moments on the way. These two older Chinese women stared at me like I was an alien and to make matters worse they did it the whole ride. After a few stops a white gentleman got on the train. They didn't even look at him. Some Chinese people think that white people are normal and everyone else is not. The excuse I often hear is that the majority of foreigners that come to China are White. I also think it has to do with China's discrimination against non-white teachers. A lot of schools here only want White teachers to work at their school. This tends to be a bigger problem at training schools, but it's still a rampant issue in China. Here's a post from a tumblr run by a 22 year old Black man living in Taiwan about this issue. I do know that Taiwan is a separate country (although the Chinese government will swear up and down it isn't and teaches its people this), but they both tend to treat foreigners the same.
I just ignored them, but there would have been a problem had phones or cameras popped out. I have only had a few annoying picture incidents during my time here. There comes a point during your time in China that you have to not become annoyed or irritated by the staring. One thing that wasn't hard for me to overcome was having people talk about you while you're near them. Heck, rude people do this back in America, but in a language that I can understand. As long as the person isn't pointing and/or laowaiing the hell out of me, we're fine (laowai is kind of a rude term for foreigner. Some non-native born Chinese embrace it, and some dislike it. I'll talk about this in a later post).
Most Chinese people on the train weren't staring. I think when Chinese people live in Beijing, they see a lot of foreigners, so it becomes normal to them. So, I figured they were tourists from their behavior. I could also tell by their attire. Most people in Beijing dress very stylishly regardless of their age. Turns out my observation was correct, they got off at the same stop as us.
Next, we followed the crowd of people to the Summer Palace. It wasn't too far down the street. There were some ladies selling bottles of water. I decided to ask how much they were, and to my surprise they were really cheap and the bottles were big. I bought one for us since we had forgot to bring water. Boba and I were starting to feel the heat. I figured prices would go way up once we got inside. We came to an opening and then we saw it!