Since my trip to Guoliangcun, I've spent most of my time going to class, studying, and going to various places around Beijing during the weekends. My home stay period ended a couple weeks ago, after which I moved back into one of the dormitories for foreign students. Our dorm building is situated directly across from a Chinese student dormitory and every weeknight at 11 o'clock we can watch their lights-out policy take effect. Though campus can be eerily quiet at night, it is bustling during the daytime. From around 8 in the morning to 8 at night, the tennis courts and basketball courts are packed with students; people are coming and going from the public showers; students are having their bikes repaired by the guy who pedals over to the library and sets up his portable bike repair shop for the day. The crowds can make getting around campus treacherous on a bike, especially since mine lacks a bell to alert people with. My front brake does, however, make a nice, loud squeak so I use that instead.
On the weekends, some students leave campus to eat dinner and sing karaoke afterward. The university performance hall also frequently hosts ballets, concerts, lectures, movies, and the like, which many students and Beijing residents attend. And then of course there was one Friday or Saturday night at about 10:30 when as I was returning to my home stay, I happened to pass by a group of 20 or 30 students, male and female, practicing swinging baseball bats outside one of the academic buildings in the dark. To summarize, campus life here is quite different from campus life at Davidson.
Whereas Davidson has an innumerable population of squirrels, Peking University is heavily occupied by cats. I see people on campus frequently attempting (unsuccessfully) to befriend them. There is a lady, however, who has succeeded through feeding them. Every day she sets out food for them at 4:30 and every day at 4:30 they show up.

The architecture on campus is also worth noting. A good number of the buildings have Chinese-style architecture like this one:

Others are more outdated-Western-style:

And then there are a few Western-Chinese hybrids. This is the gigantic library:

On a different note, this past weekend I went to the Cultural Palace of Minorities. The museum typically showcases exhibits for the 56 different ethnic groups in China. This month, however, marks the 50th anniversary of Serf Emancipation Day (the day when the Tibetan Autonomous Region was initially established) and so the museum's halls currently feature exhibits solely dedicated to the history and current affairs of Tibet. I would rather not say much about the museum simply because talk about Tibet is somewhat tense right now. I will say, though, that going to the museum has made me want to learn more about the region.
Lastly, this is something that I've been meaning to post for a while and doesn't have anything to do with the rest of this post; it's just something that I think is funny. In the center of Beijing is Tiananmen Square. And in the southern part of the square is Mao Zedong's mausoleum.

And next to the maosoleum, what else but a basketball court.