For my spring break, I got the opportunity to be one of 28 students who gets to represent the Calgary Board of Education at the International Youth Leadership Summit in Beijing, China. Below is a quick blog post about what we did today during our trip to Beijing. You can find out more about our entire trip here: http://iyls2012.cbegloballearning.ca/
Today was a very exciting tourist-y day! We got to start the morning off later then we have before, waking up at 7 a.m. After that we all had breakfast before mustering and realizing that essentially everyone (myself definitely included) managed to forget something. Whether it was your sunglasses, sunscreen or guidebook – the elevator was busy. After finally heading out, we got on the bus and went to the Beijing Planning Museum. This was definitely a cool and unique stop but it would be SOOOO much better if all of our minds weren’t all on Tiananmen Square, which was our next stop.
Finally getting to Tiananmen Square was totally surreal. Both to myself and apparently all the other tourists there also since there was never a stop in the amount of pictures being taken of us. It was amazing to see all of the classic symbols of Chinese history like the picture of Mao that hangs, his mausoleum (and the line) and the Museum of National History. It was definitely exciting to see it all and hear about it (did you know that you can only spend three minutes in Mao’s mausoleum?) but I really wish that we could see a lot more of the insides of the sites.
Next we went to a completely vegetarian restaurant, which was surprisingly good! There was even tofu that was specifically made to taste like fish. After that we headed off to the Forbidden City which was absolutely amazing. It was an absolutely HUGE place and every time that we thought that we were getting to the end of the city, there would be another courtyard. It was really interesting to see how the emperor lived centuries ago – that’s an experience that we would definitely never get in Canada. We headed back to our hotel and had an hour to hang out and get ready before we headed out for another “lazy susan” dinner of shared dishes. Today was definitely a very exciting day and I can’t wait for the next, along with our presentation to the Canadian embassy.