Our third full day in Beijing started off like the last two with breakfast at the hotel. I bring this up because our hotel offers the best breakfast, including pancakes, pastries and all types of fruits. Its always refreshing to wake up to a good meal, plus it helps provide the well needed enegry for the day's activities.

The first stop we made was to the Alliance Francaise Auditorium, where we heard from a panel of speakers that work in the intellectual property area in China. Our list of speakers included James Luo, Ray Moroney, Eric Priest and David Wolf. The key take ways from this panel discussion included the transformation in IP protection that is occuring in China, the challenges of enforcement and the continuous importance of IP rights for both companies in China and forigen based companies wanting to do business in China. The conclusion was mixed, with some progresses having been achived, whearas the rampant examples of counterfit products shows that there is still a long way to go.

This discussion was an interesting precursor to our next stop of the day, which was to E-Plaza Electronics Mall at Haidian. Having just learned about the rampant counterfit goods (and how often times even the vendors don't know if what they are selling is counterfit) we were a little nervous buying any high-end electronics during our shopping visit. However, it was still fun to see the diffrent stores and try to fact find on what was real and what was counterfit.

After the shopping visit, we became tourists again, and went to see the sights of Beijing. The Forbidden City is one of the best places we have been able to see thus far. The history of this area dates back to the 15th century and most of the buildings that make up the Forbidden City dated back to this period. I was impressed with how massive the grounds are, covering a large portion of the center of Beijing. After our hour visit, we boarded the buses once again and half of us chose to go back to the hotels while the other half went to a tea ceremony.

The tea ceremony was interesting. We gathered around two tables while one of the servers performed the ceremony, in which she went through several steps in preparing the tea and explaining how women and men hold the tea cup diffrently. Women hold the cup with thier fingers out, while the men do not. Overall, it was a neat experience and provided a great way to see a diffrent side of chinese culture.

If you watched the Olympic coverage on NBC this past summer, you probably saw the clips of The Night Market, where food vendors prepare and sell all sorts of items, including scorpions, beetles and other things that I won't meintion by name on this blog. A few people from the group were daring enough to eat the scorpions. To my knowledge, they are all still okay.

My personal take on the day is that Beijing has a lot of culture to offer. I was speaking with a few of my fellow classmates and it seems that everyone is surprised by how much Beijing has to offer. In addition, I have been impressed with the infrastructure of the city; everything from the subway to the city's skyscrapers are amazing and are all on a scale that is much larger than anything I have seen before. From what I hear, Shanghai is suppose to be even more modern, so I am looking forward to being able to compare the two cities in a few days when we head to Shanghai.