Day 12 – Lenovo, Peking Duck, Lecture and Silk Market

by Plus3 China as experienced by Rosalyn

We started today bright and early with our tour of Lenovo. Since we were at the international headquarters, they give a lot of tours and the whole thing was very impressive. We got to see some of Lenovo’s history with their original computers from the 80s. We got to see a lot of cool things like the torch they designed for the 2008 Olympic and some of their newer technology. Our guide told us that Lenovo plans to increase their presence in the U.S. market. Right now the majority of their sales revenue is domestic.

For lunch, it was fortunate that we were all looking very nice in our business casual ensembles because the Peking duck restaurant was on the fancy side. The duck was probably the best thing I ate in China. We were given thin wraps and lettuce leaves to eat the duck in. You would take your wrap and fill it with duck, mild onion and a sweet teriyaki sauce, then fold it up and enjoy.  We were served other accompaniments like duck-bone soup and a yummy stuffed eggplant.  I even tried some duck brain. Following our extremely satisfying lunch, we walked back to the hotel and had some time to change clothes and relax before our lecture.

Our lecturer was an older woman who just radiated intelligence.  As soon as the lecture was over, a group of us went to the Silk Market accompanied by Ruby. It was then that suffocation by subway occurred. When we transferred to our second subway, we ended up at a subway line that cuts across the center of Beijing. Thus, it is incredibly busy, especially because we were there during rush hour. When it was finally our turn to board, we were shoved on by a herd of people. There were guards who were stuffing people into the subway. I have never had so little personal space in my life. For a few moments I was worried about being suffocated to death. Luckily, our journey only required one stop in that subway car and we got off to transfer to a less-crowded line.

The Silk Market was very similar to the Pearl Market. I haggled for some silk scarves and other gifts. I had originally wanted to go to spend some of the Yuan that I still had, thinking that I had too much. Funnily enough, I ended up needing to go to the ATM to withdraw more because I found so many things I liked. The best thing about those markets is walking around and seeing all of the cool things being sold.