Our last day in Beijing was a little more relaxed than the very tumultuous previous days, yet nonetheless of course very interesting. We started by going through a part of the city by foot and bus (which is, by the way, not more crowded than it frequently is in Berlin). Our first destination was the house in which Deng Xiaoping lived, where our tour guide gave us a long lecture about the good doings of their former leader. Unsurprisingly, he left out that Deng had ordered the crackdown on the students protests in Beijing, killing thousands.

We then continued walking to a park where we were supposed to relax for a while and have some lunch. Instead, however, I asked my Chinese teacher (from Taiwan, the Republic of China) to translate some of the propaganda posters I had taken photos of in the last six days. It was a strange situation – we were standing in public space in a park in Beijing, surrounded by Chinese police forces and my Chinese teacher was translating propaganda posters to me.
Just like in the park we visited a couple days ago, there were elderly people sitting together, playing games, dancing or doing sports here as well.

In the park there was a hill which would give us an overview of the forbidden city. The air was actually quite clean, at least for Beijing standards, we thought, so most of us went around not wearing our masks. But most of us did decide to put their masks back on when we saw the view of the forbidden city…

We continued our journey through Beijing by foot to a restaurant where we were treated with a huge bowl of soup per person with pretty much everything from noodles over vegetables to meat inside it. Then we went back to the hotel a little earlier to be able to pack our suitcases for the next day – we would leave at 5 in the morning.