Second Half of the Beijing Trip

After the class mates left Ashley and I stayed in Beijing for a few more days. We were able to see a lot more than had we not stayed and we were very happy to have been able to stay there longer.the first day Ashley and I had together we went to a place called the Millenium Art Museum (it looked rainy, so we didnt want to do a lot outside). The museum had a lot of pictures of travelers from the past (such as missionaries that came to china) and explained their impact on the world. Aftwerwards we went to a public park (cost 2RMB or 20UScents) per person to get in, and wandered around inside for a while. by this point in time it was 2 or 3 pm and we saw in the distance a very large tower that looked like it had a bubble at the top for viewing things from. We decided to leave the park from the opposite side (which took about an hour) and walk towards the tall tower. When we got to the tower we found out it was the Central China TV tower (CCTV tower) and decided to go to the top. going to the top only cost about 15USD which included a tour around the top area. We looked around a lot and sent a couple of postcards home from the top of the tower before going down. We also found out they had a rotating diner at the top, but we didnt understand their translations well enough so we were unable to buy tickets for the dinner. After this we went to a bank and stayed inside because it began to downpour rain extremely heavily, after a few minutes we ran to a nearby bus to get back to the train (underground) to go back to our hostel. Before going back to our hostel we stopped at a restaurant called Sizzlers, which had an extremely good tasting cheeseburger (ashley got chicken) and they brought out some breaded shrimp for us for free (I'm guessing because we were foreigners haha) which were extremely good. We then headed back to our hostel and slept for the night. The second day we went to the beijing zoo which took nearly 6 hours to walk all the way through, they had an extremely large area built for animals which was split into 4 sections. After heading back to our hostel we waited a couple of hours before having the hostel drive us to an acrobatic show that was fairly close. the show was very cool and had a lot high jumping and flipping, the end which seemed kinda silly had one of those "death spheres" that its basically a 20ft tall sphere. what they did was add one motorcycle, then add another, and another, until they had 5/6 motorcycles inside this ball driving around going upside down and sideways. After this we went back to the hostel and slept.The third day we went to a Theme Park called Happy Valley, it was also incredibly large and somewhat busy. we went on a lot of rides and had a lot of fun in the theme park, we were there all day until about 7 pm. afterwards we went to a bargaining place that we had gone to before and bought a few things. I bought a chess set, a pearl (not real) ring, Mahjong, some shirts, and some shoes. overall we payed extremely low amounts for everything compared to what they should have been (all things considered they are very good copies of the real thing). Our final day in Beijing Ashley and I went to the Olympic stadium and wandered around this area for a long time. after we went to the Beijing Hard Rock Cafe, which had really nice food and was a 2 floor restaurant. The inside had a dome top that had 5 of the top bands/artists of past musicians and also had 3 large stained glass windows with Elvis, Jimmy Hendrix and another musician in it. It was very nice eating here and relaxing on our final day. After this we left back for hangzhou and slept on the train. (Ashley ate starfish from a nightvendor before we left too, I forgot to mention that haha, though i did not want to eat it)