Announcments: More gifts for people and the internet is still too slow to post pictures. My apologizes.

Today I didn't do much of anything. The group left for the Temple of Heaven at 6:00 am while I stayed back and slept. They went and saw people doing their morning exercises which consisted of Tai Chi, hackey sack, some ring toss, and dancing. I really regret not going. After they returned from the Temple of Heaven we went to our usual breakfast place. We said good bye to the owners of the restaurant and took a few pictures with them. They were such nice people, and it was unfortunate to have to leave Beijing. While at breakfast I noticed a guy drinking something out of a green bottle. I assumed that it was some sort of indigestion stuff, but I later figured out that it was 112 proof liquor. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA Once we were finished we took a taxi to the Beijing train station. I note that it sucked because they didn't have AC on and they had glass panels on the roof. So basically the sun just came right through and created a greenhouse effect inside the building. Anyways, we took the bullet train down to Tian Jin. It only took us a half hour and it was a very smooth ride. We were picked up by some students from Hebei Tech and took a cab through the city to the campus.
Hebei Tech has roughly 30,000 students in total. They have three campuses and the university is huge. It's not as nice as Peking University, but Pekiing University is considered one of the top three universities in China. We had a very good dinner that consisted of many dishes. We all thought the food was really good, but was informed by one of the students from the campus that there is much better food in China. So I guess I still have to find it somewhere. We met up with one of my friends who was an exchange student at Winona this past year. It was nice to see a familiar face in an unfamiliar place. He took us down to one of the Tian Jin night markets and we just walked around and looked at the stuff the street vendors were selling.
My friend, Lei, told us many things about Hebei that are different from Winona. First, the electricity in the dorms gets turned off in the middle of the day and at 11 pm at night. I think that this is a great way to save energy, but he seemed to think otherwise. Second, Lei told us that tuition along with room and board cost roughly $900 American dollars for the year. I was very surprised by this fact. Winona State is considered a cheap university in America and tuition still runs around $8,000 a year. Third, girls and guys are not aloud in each others dorms no matter the time of day. But there are places where students can go and rent rooms by the hour off campus….hahahaha. Lastly, and probably the most interesting is that students do not get to choose their class schedule. Their advisors pick all their classes for them. Also, once a student chooses their major they are put into a group of about 30 students and those 30 students have the same schedule. (So they all take the same classes at the same time) Lei expressed that this was unfortunate because he did not get the chance to meet as many people as he would like.

Well the day is done for now. Sorry it wasn't very interesting, but it is time to go to bed. We are going to hangout in Tian Jin for the day and leave for Nanjing on the overnight train. Come back and look at my blog in a couple days.

Good night!