Amazing Beijing: Part 2

Ok, it took about 4 hours to do the last post which is why we did it in two parts.  The pictures were taking so stinkin long to load!  This is the second portion of our trip and Jason is teaching right now so it's all up to me, sorry.  I hope you like pictures, because there are lots.

Thursday we were mostly on our own.  Jared had to work so they sent us into the city with the driver, Mr. Lee, and a plan for the day.  We stopped off at the National Museum of China and tried to find the entrance for about 20 minutes before we realized it was closed!  We went through our options and decided to head off to the cool food market Jennifer had told us about.  Mr. Lee brought us to the street and after walking along a street full of high end stores and thinking he had brought us to the wrong place we turned the corner into the street food market.  It was jam packed with people and vendors selling things like dried seahorse, live scorpions on skewers, squid, starfish, and whole ducklings.  We didn't try any of that, but we did get some fried dumplings, candied strawberries, and deep friend banana puff thingies which were all pretty good.  There were also lots of vendors selling more souvenir type of things.  We got a couple things that we'd been wanting and didn't really have to try too hard for some!  Probably our favorite buy was a pretty, carved jade ball.  We'd seen similar ones at other places and I've really wanted one, but they can get pretty pricey so I didn't quite know how to go about buying an affordable one.  Anyways, I was just looking at one and the lady showed me the price of 298 RMB ($48). ha, yeah right!  So I just put it down because I wasn't in the mood to talk her down and I knew we could always get one somewhere else.  As we started to walk away, she brought it down to something like 150 RMB.  I ignored her so she said 100 RMB.  I honestly was not intending on buying it so I kept walking and next thing I know she offered it for 70 RMB ($11).  That seemed much more reasonable to me so we decided to just go for it.  We're pretty happy about it, but I guess for all we know it's still worth much less than that!  Oh, the beauties of being foreigners and everyone thinking you're rich. 

After the market we headed off to the Summer Palace.  There was quite a bit of debate whether we should do that or see a couple other things, but in the end I am so glad we went.  It was beautiful!  Once again, the palace was a huge compound of halls, towers, pavilions, and gardens on the edge of a lake.  Because it was so big we didn't get to see nearly as much as we would have liked, but what we saw was beautiful.  The first stop was the theater hall the Empress Cixi used to watch Chinese Operas.  We got to see the costumes and props and some other chambers surrounding it.  We walked around the lake a bit and had our pictures taken again with some random Chinese people. 

Not a great picture, but this is the upper stage

Part of the lake.  Pictures seriously don't do it justice

We wandered through some other halls until we got to a hill leading up to the Tower of Buddhist Incense. We walked up some stairs and a pretty rugged path and stopped to look at some other stuff before getting back on the trail.  As we continued climbing with the other people, we noticed it was definitely a back trail.  It got really steep and rocky and soon we were climbing through trees and over a fence to get to the tower!  We figured all the people were avoiding something, but we didn't know what until, on our way back down, we climbed down a ton of really steep stairs.  I guess climbing up the side of the big hill is better than stairs? The tower itself was really neat, though, with lots of old Buddha statues, a great view of the palace and lake, and some pretty architecture. 

apparently we weren't supposed to take pictures, but we didn't know till after it was done and the lady got mad at us...oops!

Isn't this view amazing? Oh, I love it!

Off to the side of the tower

A couple views of the Tower of Buddhist Incense.













That was the end of our Summer Palace experience!  So so cool and I would highly recommend it to anyone who goes to Beijing.

Friday: GREAT WALL OF CHINA!! Holy cow, walking on the wall was one of the awesomest (yes, it's a word) things I have ever done!  We hiked up a lot of stairs to actually get up to the wall, but once we were there it was so worth it.  I will never forget that minute when I climbed through the doorway leading up to the actual wall, stepped out and realized I was on the Great Wall of China!!  It's that thing I heard about in Elementary School and how it's so big you can see it from space and dreamed of being on it because it's in Mulan and then learned all about it's violent beginnings and all the dead bodies that are buried in it and how it's one of the wonders of the world and holy smokes I was on it. Yeah, I was freakin' out a bit.  Jason said it was cute, but I'm sure everyone else just thought it was ridiculous.  We took almost 200 pictures and spent about four hours hiking up and down a portion of it.  It's actually quite the workout if you want to get anywhere on that thing.  The wall completely runs with the shape of the mountains so there's a lot of ups and downs and weirdly proportioned stairs.

The hike up. sheesh, we thought this was bad?

Our first good view of the wall.

This is where I was freaking out so Jason made me reenact it :)

It's hard to see, but on many of the distant peaks are watchtowers.

View through  a watchtower window. Man, it's pretty.

We may or may not have left our mark on the wall....

stairs....

....stairs...

....and more stairs.  They were much steeper in real life and made us dizzy whenever we stopped to look back. As we were hiking down we overhead a girl climbing up telling her friend that it's kind of like Biggest Loser.  It totally felt like it!

Look at that hottie just chillin' in a guardhouse on the Great Wall.

Part of the unrestored wall is behind us if you look closely (According to spell check, unrestored is not a word.  Does that mean the proper word would be stored....?)

 

Stored Great Wall...hehe, that sounds funny.

Yup, we hiked that entire thing plus lots more.  We're cool.

We took a tobbagan thing down the mountain to the parking lot which was fun, but a bit cramped for our sore muscles.  It was such a great day!

Saturday was the day we went home.  Our train didn't leave till 4:30 so we spent the morning with Jared wandering through 798 Street.  It's kind of like the hipster side of Beijing.  I'm not sure what the technical definition of it is, but it was a neighborhood of modern art, cafes, and museums.  It was kind of neat to see and we got some really good pizza there!

Nothing like modern art...

We got to the train station pretty early so stalled for time by hanging out at KFC again and then getting a McFlurry at McDonald's.  I was rather disappointed with McDonald's because the girl just put ice cream in a cup and scoop of oreo on top then handed it to me! Excuse me?  What is the point of a McFlurry if there is no Flurry in it? Urgh.  Anyways, we got on the train which was slightly nicer than the one we took before and didn't smell quite so bad.  We also were pleasantly surprised when it only stopped once before Xingtai which put us back in our apartment an hour and a half earlier than planned! 

So, all in all, we really enjoyed Beijing and a big thank you goes out to Jared and Jennifer for that! They put their entire lives on hold while we were there and also let us enjoy the luxury of being in a real home again. It was so good to get to know more of our family members while spending a week in one of the world cities!