Zebrafish and sightseeing make for a busy weekend!

Pfew, it has been one busy weekend. Friday we had a unique opportunity to meet Professor Zhang and to learn about the research being done with developmental biology using zebrafish as a model organism. After a brief presentation we got to tour the laboratory facilities. There were rooms upon rooms of different shapes and colors of zebra fish. The PKU facility is one of the largest in the world for housing zebrafish and they currently house around 100,000 fish! After we saw all the different tanks we went to see how they manipulate the fish. One graduate student was surrounded by all thirty of us while trying to insert genetic material into a 1 mm egg using a fine tip needle. 

Friday afternoon we all traveled to the Olympic stadium. I couldn’t believe I was stepping on the same ground that Micheal Phelps had walked two years prior. The best part of the tour was when it began to get dark and the pool facilities lit up in different patterns and colors. 

Saturday was our first full day of touring around Beijing. We took the short metro ride over to the summer palace to walk around for the better part of the afternoon. The summer palace was very extensive and very crowded. My favorite part ended up being the walk around the lake. The high concentrations of people tended to die down when we were on the waterfront¸ making for a peaceful and reflective walk. After walking around for a couple of hours we decided to break up the day by going to a Korean barbeque restaurant. The food was amazing, it seemed as though every five minutes another dish would come out. By the end no one knew what we were eating because they couldn’t remember what was ordered and what had come.

Sunday was definitely my favorite day so far. The day had a rough start with the high temperature and high humidity. On this day we all traveled to the Forbidden City and ended up walking around for a good couple miles to see all the sites in the emperors palace. After surpassing all of the obstacles we all headed to a mall to have some lunch. After lunch we went to Bei Hai park which is filled with loads of hidden paths and small Buddhist monasteries to visit. The whole park was a fantastic site to see and by this time the weather had become temperate and everyone’s moods had heightened. After our hike through the hills we decided to relax and rent a peddle boat. The two boats of students raced around the water. That evening we all decided to get dinner on the lakeside. We ended up by a strip of restaurants and had live music playing while we ate. This was definitely the cherry on top to a great day in China.