Saturday, October 18, 2008

Mini-cation!

We've been in Beijing since Thursday. Our dear friends from Knoxville made the huge trip over the North Pole to visit us so we decided to show them as much of China as we can in 10 days.

We flew in Thursday and went to the Temple of Heaven, which is a temple (well, duh) with a really nice park around it. It's my friend Sharon's favorite part of Beijing because when she was there a few weeks ago there were old people dancing to traditional Chinese music, doing tai chi and playing mah jong. Basically it's where you see Chinese people doing Chinese-y things. Unfortunately, we got there too late in the day to see all that cool stuff, so we just saw the temple. Ah, well.

Friday we went to the Great Wall of China. Amazing. Spectacular. Really, really cool. And a whole lotta exercise. Steps galore and towers to climb. They were shooting a video up there which was cool to watch.

Everywhere we go people comment on how many children there are all in one place - 6! I hear "lio haizi!" so many times. Many, many people stop us to take photos of our kids. We've really gotten mobbed a few times. The kids are handling it well, though, and it's kind of fun for my friends' daughters.

We also went to a cloisonne factory to learn about that detailed and painstaking process, and a jade market. Christmas shopping!

We went to the Hard Rock Cafe, which is the nicest HRC I've ever been to! Had a fantastic dinner there and great music to listen to. A little slice of normal...

Today we went to the Forbidden City, which is vast and beautiful and ornate and waaaaaay too much walking. We took a bus to get there and tried to take a bus back but kept getting turned around and missing our connections. Finally ended up in a couple taxis - there are 10 of us altogether.

Tomorrow we'll have a nice breakfast at the hotel - the Holiday Inn Central Plaza, which I highly recommend - and pack and head back home to Shekou. Looking forward to getting back to my bed and my shower and my kitchen!

We've had a really great time and I'll try to post some photos when we get home and I can hook my camera up to the computer.

1 comment:

heidy said...

sounds wonderful! glad to hear that you're enjoying yourselves!
we just got back from a trip to DC.It was great playing tourist and meeting up with some old friends! the weather was incredible. We went into an international market...I thought of you Michelle, they had row after row of fish! just sitting there on ice and smelling pretty bad!