Day 10 – This morning we visited the Birds Nest and Water Cube. On our way, the bus got stuck under a tree. The tree branch scraped the top and it took a while for us to get moving again. Once we made it to the Birds Nest we took pictures of it, and pictures outside. It was a beautiful day. It was pretty empty inside, our group being the majority of the people in the section we were in. We saw that you could ride a Segway around the track so obviously a lot of us wanted to do that. Vivian got us a discount. I was the only one who had ridden a Segway before and there were normal sized ones and kid ones. I got a kid one…. It was pretty slow, but it was blue. I also wanted to take pictures while riding around but I kept getting yelled at for taking pictures because it was “not safe.” I got some good pictures though. After the Segway tour, we got a group picture on them and we visited the gift shop. I bought two postcards. Postcards are very hard to find in China I’ve noticed. After we decided not to go to the water cube because we had been there on Sunday and instead we had lunch paid for at KFC. KFC seems to be the go-to fast food in China. All of us are getting pretty sick of it.
We went to Capital Bio which is a microarray software developing company. The building was open and clean and had lights in the shape of cells. We had a tour of the products they make and of the labs for them doing research. Their products are detectors and devices to aid researchers. They hope to make personal devices in the future. They want the personal devices to be as easy to operate as a cell phone. Down in the basement they had coolers with millions of bone marrow samples. The Chinese version of the Red Cross hopes to use these samples to aid those in need. We also had a tour of their outside garden. It was nice and peaceful.
After we had no time for dinner and rode the subway to a kungfu show. It was the same subway route we took to get to the pearl market. The show was pretty cool and was a cliché story about becoming a kungfu master. My favorite part was when younger kids were doing backflips and landing on their heads. I have no idea how that they do that without hurting themselves.
After we needed dinner and the only thing open was KFC. So I ate KFC for the second time that day. Then it was time to get some sleep.
fawcettplus3china2012 