Mao, Underground City, and The Pearl Market

Day Six: I’m going to call the not planned days “Sleepy Day” because we sleep in and then find some place in mom’s book to go. So today is a “Sleepy Day.” After we got out of bed and got ready for the day we went to go see Mao’s body/tomb thingy which was free, but cameras and bags are not allowed inside so mom stayed outside while I went in. It was pretty quick, you show a picture ID and go through the things at an airport and go inside and it’s all dim, and he’s in uniform and has the Chinese flag over most of his body, plus a light shone on his face making it an odd orange color. You walk through pretty quickly and walk into a little store with Mao things inside. Then mom went in while I stayed with the bags. Then we walked to The Underground City, only to discover a piece of paper saying “The Underground City is closed” and someone had written in pencil “(PERMANENTLY).” Sadly, we walked away and bought some ice cream (mine was some sort of a milky thing with dried grape things. It was odd, but fine, and very good. After that, we took the train to the Pearl Market again, this time buying 3 fakes, a DS Pokemon game ($7 US), 2 Pokemon card packs (less then $0.75 US together), and a real jade bracelet ($7 US), plus some Pokemon figures.

Great Wall Tour with Sophia

Day Five: Woke up at 7:00a.m.ish and had to get ready for the day ’cause we where going to a tour. The bus picked us up at 8:00a.m.ish. On bus was a little Asian girl that is 7 years old and named Sophia (with a little pokemon figure of pikichu in her hands), her father (which doesn’t look Asian at all but that may be because they‘re from New Zealand), two Indian men with small moustaches, a over round man from Florida, a Asian woman, a youngish couple, our tour guide a Chinese man funny and used to be a translator (so his English was really good), and the bus diver picked up two Chinese collage age looking girls. After we picked up the girls the tour took us to the Ming Dynasty tombs although I never saw any tomb at all… Then we headed to a giant jade shop which they call a factory, but all I saw were three maybe four people working on jade in a smallish room. After looking at a bunch of small little jade figures $20.00 US dollars each (which was the cheapest thing there), the tour included lunch and we all ate to our fill (at lest I did anyway). Then the Great Wall at last! Well not really ‘cause of a giant traffic jam we didn’t get to go to the area we wanted, but oh well we all walked to the nearest part of the Great Wall and boy was it steep, and the steps where so high (which the over round guy later said it was one of the hard parts of the wall)! I almost made it but it was so steep and mom would not go any farther she let me go up farther but said I had to come back at a point in time……… After we did the wall the tour took us to a giant silk shop (again like the jade shop it said it was a factory but not seeing many workers). After that they took us back to the hostel, and that was the tour.

a pile of money at the statue's feet.

Are those big steps or not?

Night Market

Day Four: Sunday is a day of rest for us (although its really not much of rest this time). We tried to go to our Mormon church, although we had the hardest time tiring to find some one who knew of the street’s name (which we had our hostel owner write it down in Chinese for us) and spoke English. Sadly we never found it. After our defeat we ate lunch on a street called Ghost street (which is apparently a famous street we didn’t know about at the time). The lunch we ate was the worst thing I’ve had so far, we had ten tiny lobster (which was so spicy that I had a 1 lobster tail remember they are tiny the tail was like 1.5 cm. it was the spiciest thing on Earth) and spicy chicken bits (including the bone bits and it was really spicy too). Later that day we went to the Oriental Plaza (which is a mall that you can just walk right out of the subway into). We ate pizza for dinner and then went to the Wangfujing Night Market, which is the place with weird food, like snakes, crickets, etc… After the Night Market I had really bad diarrhea (which I’m guessing is from the lobster ). Then it’s back to Zzzzzzzzz……

Anyone want a seahorse?

And some tourists braver than us...

The Cycle Tour, The Temple of Heaven, and The Pearl Market

Day three. We went to a bicycle tour (which was to circle the forbidden city and see a hutong area)(a hutong area is a really poor area with just a sidewalk no streets sort of thing) and the tour was great. It was VERY interesting seeing it ‘cause there’s more bicycles than cars, plus as it’s the must have in Beijing. After the Cycle tour we had dumplings for lunch and went to Temple of Heaven which is like Central Park but you pay to go in and there’s three area’s where the Ming and Qing dynasty’s prayed and had ceremonys. After along while maybe 6:30ish we headed over to the Pearl Market and a toy store. The people who sold things each got a stall (each was/is filled to the brim with toys). I got some pokemon cards and figures (tiny figure). Our feet were screaming for rest so we got some pastries at a little pastry shop on our way back to the hostel and ate the pastries and read some of my Fire Star book.

This is the tour guide.

And this is the tour!

Temple of Heaven

Dancing

Playing

Singing

Buildings

More Playing

And a nice something to end the day.

Forbidden City

Day Two: Today we went to the Forbidden City made up of 9,999 rooms, and 800 buildings! The Forbidden City was the Emperors home back in the day. And boy do Chinese people push! There are hardly any sort of lines in China (or at least Beijing) everyone pushes and tries to keep their ground ! ! ! After giving up on the 9,999 rooms we came back to our little room for an hour of rest. After that we watched a live acrobat show, which was quite scary at some points. After the show we ate Beijing duck which is not bad if I had to say what it tasted like I think I’d say it tasted like chicken with a tad of beef, maybe?