...like i said. At first. But this Polish guy's snoring was just too extreme to not get waken up by the sound. And once awake I noticed how unbearable hot the whole room was, so there was no way I could go back to sleep. So I took a nice walk through what felt to me a crazy cold hostel and bugged some other people by leaving audio wechat messages at 3am at night. So my appology goes out to all of them that woke up by me laughing on the staircase. I know, unacceptable behavior. So after the hours passed and the day reached a reasonable time to get changed and washed (6am did it) I headed downstairs in the main hang out area - btw next to the staircase the only place with bad functioning wifi - and had a chat with other visitors before heading out to spend the day with my Chinese teacher. As I mentioned before, she lives in Beijing giving me class over the internet, but coming originally from Chengdu, she is great in giving me ideas for where to go, what to see and can relate to places I mention in stories. As I never met her in person, I was more than excited to finally meet her that day. We met at Tiananmen to start our day with the Forbidden City. It was great to finally meet her and just walk and talk around like sisters. She was great company, also giving me input on the Forbidden City's history and interesting facts. The whole place is massive and I immediately felt humble. Though the other tourists - mostly Chinese - must have felt like bosses, trying to literally fight their way to the front of a huge crowd infront of every single building's inside. Nuts. And their pictures could not have even been good, as for all the pushing and boxing, the whole crowd was constantly moving from left to right, screwing almost every single one of my pictures. Oh well, memories are worth a lot more than pictures, right?
After walking through this gigantic place and looking at Cixi's (the wife that actually had the power over the whole imperial while her son was still pretty young) breast measurer - literally, this lady hired women from all over the country to give their breast milk, so that she herself could bath in it and even drink it every single day. People say that's why her skin was so beautiful. But not any woman's milk could be used. They had to have delivered to babies and finally their breast must have had a specific size. And that's where this measurer comes into place. In my opinion it was rediculously huge and I can't imagine that there were enough women with boobs that large. But somehow it must have worked.
So having seen every bit of the Palace, we made our way out to find a place to eat lunch. While walking, Emma treated me to a typical Beijing street eat - called tanghulu aka candied fruits on a stick (to be added: extremely bad for health and teeth). But delicious! So after not being able to feel my toes again we ended up in a huge mall (this feeling of slowly heating up again is priceless!) eating hotpot. But people, now listen closely. This place HITS THE SPOT! Everybody has his/her own little pot infront of him/her and cooks up his veggies and meat by himself. Totally great. And their signature sauce to drench your food in after it's been cooked was just to swim in! Oh this was soo good! I think we ate for 2 hours, but this is the whole point about eating hotpot. You eat a bit, then you talk, then you eat a bit,... I love this. So you could easily eat hotpot the whole day :D so afterwards we made our way walking down the biggest shopping street back to Tiananmen Square where we watched the flag pulling ceremony. Neat thing. While we were waiting at the Square for about 40min before though, there was literally every minute another Chinese person coming up to us asking for a picture with me. It was hilarious! Emma said we should have better put up a table and charged ¥1 for a shot. Man, that would have been quite some money. But it's fun to see how easy you can make Chinese people happy ;-) so after the ceremony it was already time to say by to Emma and to head back to my hostel. She is such a cute girl though and I was more than happy to be able to bring her some homemade cookies and a little pre christmas gift. She was too :-)
So on my way home I hooked myself up with some typical Beijing cakes and munched them down in my hostel while chatting to other people. I love people staying at hostels, they are all just really adventurous and have their own stories to tell. So no way you could get bored. I went to bed early that day, because of lack of sleep the night before and was more than delighted to see that the snorer had already left ;-P