Trip to Beijing (first half)

So the past 10 days have been very busy for me, We (Central abroad students) went to beijing from the 14th until the 17th, but Ashley and i stayed in Beijing until the 22nd.
The first day of being in Beijing we went to Tian'anmen square and the forbidden city. the square and the forbidden city are huge, and I have many photos I need to upload to show what it looks like. the weather wasn't very clear so we could not see very far but it was still a great sight.
the second day we went to the great wall, which was about 3 hours drive away and then it was a 10k walk back, so about 7 miles or so. The wall was very broken down in areas and i felt dizzy at times being up high and walking on a broken down wall with no sidewalls. we were all very tired by the time we got back and over the course of the day I had about 6 bottles of water. We left at about 10am and got done at about 3pm or so.
the third day we went and saw pandas at the zoo and then went to the Summer palace. the summer palace was very large and had a nice pagoda at the top of a hill inside. After going to the summer palace most of the afternoon we went to a Kungfu show at night which was very cool. it was more of a story than a show though, but it was still exciting to see.
on the final day of the class trip we went to the temple of heaven and saw a few old relics there, there was a lot of walking around to see everything but it was still fun. After seeing this we went to the Pearl/Silk market. This is basically a market to buy clothes, electronics, shoes, and jewelry. Though one must keep in mind that almost everything inside was a knockoff and not actually the real thing. I was able to buy 9 nike/adidas shirts (i figured i would replace all my old ones and i only brought 1 shirt to beijing on accident) for about 50USD total (yes 9 shirts for 50$). I also bought a new pair of Nikes for about 20USD (though I am saving them for when i get home to the US). I was able to purchase a few other things there after ashley and I made a second trip there, but it was all extremely cheap to purchase. After this the other students had to return to Hangzhou, but Ashley and I still had until the 22nd so we went to our Hostel which was next to Tian'anmen square and got situated before going to sleep (we were very tired and had been walking every day so we decided to rest some).

School Trip

The school had a class trip where anyone that wanted to go could go to the Thousand Islands Lake which is about 2 hours away. After arriving there our class had a designated Boat that we took to about 3 or 4 islands to wander around on. The islands are somewhat tourist style and have set paths that everyone is allowed to walk on. The island we went on that had the most stuff had a zoo style area on the path towards the end with a lot of birds inside large cages, though my camera died so I was unable to get more than a couple pictures for the whole day. For lunch we had a chinese style lunch which consisted of local area fish in soups and some random vegetables.
the second island we went to was the tallest in the lake and had a lookout point from the top where you could see out across the lake, though it was fairly smoggy and we could not see very far, it was a very good view.
there were a couple of other islands but we were mainly focused on going to those 2 islands and then boating around. It was overall a nice day besides the smog up high, so it was a good day to go boating.