How about those Wisconsin sports teams, huh? The Brewers, Badgers, and Packers are all having great seasons. It can be a nice distraction from things here. I like to stay updated on things I'm missing back home, but back to Beijing. I spent the entire second day at the Summer Palace. When they say palace they mean a small mountain next to a lake on which they built tons of buildings for emperors to meditate, lounge, and worship in. Needless to say at the end of this day, my feet were tired. My traveling group spent about 6 hours there and we saw a little more than half the area. It's huge. The main building to see is the large Buddhist Incense Temple on the middle of the mountain. I am standing at the bottom of it here. We arrived at the bottom of the temple after walking for a couple hours already. We all looked at each other, looked up at the temple, took a moment to motivate ourselves, and began our climb. Of course, they didn't have elevators when they built these things.
The view from the top was spectacular. Even though the air was a bit hazy, the surrounding hills, the lake, and herbiage made the many stairs worth it. Our descent took us down to the lake. We checked out an island which we saw from above at the temple. Then came time to try and find our way out. We had already been lost or misguided by the map. The scale of things was off so things that looked big on the map were small most of the time. The smaller things on the map took up lots of space, very confusing. On our way out we stopped at a few other places of importance. We made it just in time for a live music performance. It featured very large bells. I saw another set like this at a museum in Wuhan. Wuhan has the largest complete set in the world. 
