Beijing Concludes

The past few days have been crazy!

Yesterday we went to Tian'amen square and the Forbidden City, which were cool. The whole think is kind of getting tiresome, because so many of the building look the same, so every temple/house we visit are identical colors and architecture. I get it, it's Chinese architecture, it has officially stopped impressing me. The only thing about Tian'amen square and the Forbidden City were the vast size of it. It was so huge that it seemed impossible for it to be one man's house.

Later in the day we went and got Beijing Duck, which was good except I accidentally took a bite of the head. The rest of the duck was very good, and served kind of in a musho style.

After lunch we went to the Temple of the Heavens, which was obviously similar architecture to everything else we've seen, except this was placed in a really beautiful garden, so it was nice to walk around. We were getting bored of all of the Chinese architecture, so we found actng as silly as possible helped pass the time

We then headed to the Silk Market, which was one of the most insane experiences of my life. People were yelling at me, and literally grabbing my arm and dragging me in there stores. The weirdest thing was the pricing. Everything sells for around 10% of the price. I bought sunglasses, and paid 30 when the original price was 360. So, we haggled a lot. Overall we found some cool stuff and were having a good time negotiating with people. We ended up buying matching shorts from this one lady who was not having as much fun in the negotiation as we were, because she started to yell at us, and told Jake he was slow in the head. However, the matching shorts are pretty funny.

Then, at night we went to a performance. It was one of these variety sows, which was cool, except for the comedy act. Not only do I not know funny Chinese current events, but I don't understand the language, so it was all lost on us.
Today we arranged for some guy, Rechrd, we met on the street to drive us to the Great Wall. Unfortunately he didn't show up, but he did trick us into going with this other girl, Crystal, who was our "guide", but didn't speak English. However, she was impressed, and made it know to us, that we were all wearing mating outfits. She first took us to a art factory hoping we would buy something, but were disappointed when we didn't. Then we went to the wall. This was really beautiful. We took like a thousand pictures, because it was really scenic, buy I don't think the pictures do it justice. The wall is one of those things that everyone should just go to at some point in there life. We all really enjoyed it, and were glad to have hired someone to take us to a remote part as opposed to the crowded area reachable by bus. After the wall She took us to a restaurant (we didn't ask to go), which was really expensive. When we said we were unhappy they really didn't look like they were going to let us go without ordering, and were confused why we wouldn't order this extravagant lunch, so we ordered some fried rice; ate it and left. Overall while the "guide" was awful, and clearly just wanting to make a commission off of us the whole experience was nice.

Later in the day we went to the Antique Market, which was a much more tamed silk market, but they still negotiated with you. Mike bought a ancient Chinese instrument, and I continued my tireless search for double sided silk embroidery to no avail.

We head out early tomorrow for Jinan, so we're calling it an early night tonight.