Dominating the Summer Palace and Blue Bar/Toads in Beijing

So today "We" walked around the summer palace. The name in itself is deceiving. It is not ONE palace, but basically a HUGE lake resort around Kunming Lke. Again, amazing to think that this place was built so long ago and the sheer size of this place was absolutely astonishing. The actually astonishing part was the fact that while it was enormous every little facet was carefully decorated. Which is in stark contrast to the US way of things where they are mass produced and very little "personality" is put into them.

Ok, so there are several ways to handle this lake. You can either A take a boat around the whole lake, you can take a paddle boat around the whole lake, you can simply walk around the lake or you can walk around the lake and walk to various islands and up and down hills to different pavilions, towers, halls, etc. Clearly, since We are into dominating things, We walked around the whole lake and took detours to visit various towers, halls, pavilions etc. This was up hills, down hills through little passageways. It was actually somewhat dangerous and I'm pretty sure that this place would not be allowed to exist in its current form in the US because of the risks involved with climbing through some of these places. Which is why I love China.



Now at night I met up with some friends of mine from Yale. Presser and Luci were DEF in the house. I also met some other Yalies, which brought the number up to 5. We went to a club/bar place which was hot, kind of gross, full of Americans, with some Yalies, played hip hop, was free to get in and there was no dress code... Don't worry I know what you're thinking... TOADS!!!!!! We stayed there for a while before we went down the street to another free club place called... bar blue, which had a dance floor, bar area and a pool table... Again those Nashvillians who have ever been in the Vanderbubble know... "bluebar." It was odd because for the time that I was there I really felt like I was in not in China. for now... that's all...