Ni hao! We got back from our trip to Beijing with Joe & Tiff on Thursday and it was awesome! We saw all that we wanted to see and more! I would say that we spent the right amount of time there because we had some extra left over to relax and wander around.
Our hotel was nice, and had a really awesome buffet breakfast. It even came with censored BBC news. Of course I knew that China is a communist country and that it censors media but dang, was it obvious. We we're watching BBC news and when the anchorman said "China has been criticized..." it automatically cut to the next news story. Wow.
China also has its own search engine instead of Google, Yahoo, etc. It doesn't allow you to go to sites that that the government doesn't approve of. I went to the business center to check email once and wanted to see if Pete and Katy had their baby yet, but it wouldn't let me go to Katy's blog. Hmmmm, maybe I'll try going through our website since we have a link, nope, not possible. I tried a few other ways and I'm guessing that any personal website or blog is blocked. Frustrating! I was definitely happy to get back to Japan where I can look at any website that I want to.
We had some great food, wanton soup, gyozas, candied crab apple with walnuts, Peking duck, and spicy chicken lettuce wraps (apparently they do have them in China and PF Chang's didn't just make it up!).
I was impressed with all the history that we saw, it was pretty amazing. From Tiananmen Square to standing on the emperors stone at the Temple of Heaven. We saw Mao in his mausoleum looking very waxy.
In my mind I would find a super cool jade bracelet to bring home. Little did I know that nice real jadeite (the higher quality jade used in jewelry) bracelets are super expensive! So I ended up getting a simple jade ring, but it's still cool.
Willard is doing a day by day summary of what we did as well has his clever and witty picture comments - click HERE to check it out!
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