shankar2k's Journal: Holiday

This next week is a national holiday in China, and so our office will be shut down. Several of our coworkers suggested that we should do something for it, so John and I decided to go to Chengdu. Chengdu is the capital of the Sichuan province, the home of that spicy style Chinese food. It's also the home city of our adviser. So we booked two train tickets to Chengdu, and we'll be heading out there tomorrow.

We decided to (try and) do some touring today as well, so we headed to Tiananmen square in hopes of seeing the Forbidden City. By the time we got inside to the ticket counter, a random chinese girl informed us that the city would close at five. So we decided to stroll down Tiananmen square instead. These other two random chinese girls approached us and struck up a conversation. They were both teachers from Manchuria, and they were also touring Beijing. They walked with us for awhile, but then suddenly remembered that they had to meet up with some friends. Maybe the impressive aura of our M$ internships intimidated them :-). After a couple of hours more wandering, we ended up at this nice international cafe called Bookworm, where we met up with Stef, the girl who hosted us when we first came to Beijing. All in all, a pretty decent day. Oh yeah, and Cal won today! Woohoo!