Beijing

Day 1
We technically arrived at 11pm on the 30th, but all we did was go straight to our hotel. One of Chris’ co-workers that’s from Beijing was on our flight and her parents drove us to our hotel. It was a bit of an adventure because our hotel was near the National Day festivities that would begin early the next day. We thought we were going to have to get dropped off a 15 minute walk from our hotel. This isn’t fun with suitcases at 11pm, Luckily we were able to get dropped off right at the door. This was a good start to the weekend. Thanks Jia!

Happy National Day China! We woke up in Beijing on the 60th anniversary of communism in China! Those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh comrades? (quote from Austin Powers, we aren’t communists) We were hoping to catch a glimpse of their once a decade military parade. We knew in advance we weren’t “allowed” to watch, but we wondered how they could hide hundreds of thousands of soldiers, ICBMs, tanks, anti-aircraft guns, etc from us?! We took a walk around after breakfast to find all the streets around us blocked off to cars, but people were walking around. On the end of our block we found a SWAT team looking type guy with a machine gun and there were soldiers lining the streets. We realized right away they weren’t there to mess around.

We ended up watching some of the parade on TV and were lucky enough to see the air show portion from our hotel room window. We saw fighter jets, attack helicopters, bombers, etc. It was sweet. We took lots of pictures. We got sick of watching TV shortly thereafter and wanted to venture out to see the city. Our hotel told us not to leave because of the restrictions around the celebration area. They warned us we might not be able to come back to the hotel if we left. We weren’t going to waste one of our days sitting around in the hotel, so we decided to risk it. We had to walk for about a half an hour to find a taxi which we didn’t think was bad. On our way to find a taxi we saw the parade participants that had just performed. They had busses lining the streets to shuttle the performers out of the area. It actually seemed very organized.

The taxi dropped us off at the Summer Palace. We decided to rent the audio tour and were on our way. It was perfect weather. It was in the 70s with a breeze. We both overdressed a bit coming from the HK heat, we thought we were going to be cold. We walked around and enjoyed the palace for a couple hours. Realizing we didn’t eat lunch we thought we’d try a snack. The hotdog/sausage on a stick thing looked pretty good. The vender thought I was crazy putting ketchup all over mine. The first bites were ok until I had a crunchy bite! Ewwww! Crunchy hotdogs?! I immediately spit the bite out of my mouth which is not something I would normally do. I'm glad we were outside. We tossed out the dogs and had suddenly lost our appetites. We wrapped up the tour with a boat ride across the lake. This was one of our favorite sights of the trip. I can see why the past emperors used it as their summer get-away.

We decided to take a load off and relax in the “bar area” of Beijing. After a confused taxi driver and a lot of walking we think we found this bar area. We picked a random place with outdoor seating and had a few beers. They had an eclectic variety of music including a Christmas carol…in October…It was starting to get dark and we were hoping to catch the fireworks show that we thought we might be able to see from our hotel room. We found a taxi and went back to the hotel for some dinner. To our surprise the taxi was able to pull right up to our hotel. Yippee! We had some yummy Peking duck, spicy tofu, noodles – a feast for dinner. We made it back to the room just in time for the fireworks. We could see most of the show right from our window.