The first point on the program for today was the summer palace, which, as the name implies, is the palace in which the emperor lived during summer. It is picturesquely located next to a lake with a strange color and dying fish.

The palace itself, however, is very beautiful and it is definitely worth visiting, even though there were at times quite many people. I made the effort to walk all the stairs up the hill – the view is quite good and we were lucky that the smog wasn’t too thick today. The temple is, like the other temples and palaces we visited in China so far, very colorful and full of details and decorations.

In the summer palace we were reminded by a sign that you’re not allowed to play soccer and not allowed to have guns with you. What a strange combination.

After leaving the summer palace we were picked up by our bus again to be driven to the next stop on today’s program. On the way, we passed by an antenna which was disguised as a tree and, which meanwhile has become a normal sight to us, propaganda posters.

The next program point was kind of disappointing – we visited the Olympic city – so what remains of Beijing hosting the 2008 Olympics. What we mostly did was stand around on an open concrete space and wait for our tour guide to decide that we’ve seen enough. My friends and me concentrated mainly on spotting the various different state security forces that walked around.

We then took a Rikshaw ride through the hutongs – the “original, old city of Beijing” as our guide explained. Our group had been invited to have lunch with a “authentic local family”, which seems suspiciously similar to what tourists are sometimes presented when they visit North Korea and are “allowed to visit local families”. Our tour guide seemed very proud of the hutongs, and said that the Chinese government worked hard to preserve them, but when we drove through the narrow roads all I could really see was poverty, and I am not quite sure why our tour guide would be willing to show it to us, especially if he is a member of the party and trying to portray a good picture of the city to us.

After the lunch at the “authentic local family”, we went on to visit another temple, one where people actually go to pray. We were allowed to burn incense sticks and go inside the buildings to see the different Buddhas – each of which stood for a different thing people could wish for, for example prosperity. Unfortunately it is considered unfriendly and unmoral to take photos of Buddhas, so I cannot present you with any. However, the rest of the temple gave enough to look at as well.

We then hit the road again to go to the last destination of this long day. As always, I was glued to the window on the way, eager to find out more about the way the standard people live here in Beijing. And I was able to find one of the famous construction sited that used bamboo to make their scaffolding on the way, as well as gain many impressions of the normal life in China.

The last stop for the day was a food street, which, we were told, not many foreigners come to but is mainly visited by Chinese people – just like we had seen at most of the tourist attractions we had visited so far. There was a lot of strange and interesting food available, including scorpions and insects, both of which some people in our group actually tried. But I limited myself to some exotic fruits and “fried ice cream”.