Beijing

I wore my gym pants backwards all morning.
 

 

Now that I've got that off my chest....we've been back from Beijing now for a while (a month to be exact) but I keep forgetting I want to be good at this blogging thing. Weird.

 We hired a tour guide who chauffeured us around for 3 straight days in a private vehicle. He was incredibly knowledgeable, which often made me feel like I was reliving my Sophomore history class... I'll let you decide how that was.

The most unexpectedly awesome part of our trip was the food. Oh. My. YUM.

Here are the highlights....
 

 

Our first stop was this restaurant where we were presented with a smorgasbord of REAL Chinese food, to include Peking duck (on the duck plate, duh). We wrapped it in a super thin Chinese tortilla (don't ask questions) and put some other great things in it and.... flavor explosion!!!!

 

 

I have dreams about this duck meal.

 

The Olympic stadium. It's not even used anymore. For anything. But the Ping-Pong hall is.

 

We saw how pearls are harvested. I only ever imagined ONE single pearl inside, but we were informed that those guys are only found in the ocean. These guys are freshwater pearls. Naturally, we bought some.

 

The Forbidden City is HUGE. It took us a few hours to walk through it. It's so amazing all of this was built so long ago. The millions of people there also thought so.

 

If you love your personal space as much as I do , I recommend drinking a heavy glass of wine if you ever visit the Forbidden City.

 

Our guide, "Fernando" (yes, he's Chinese), said this is his FAVORITE FOOD. He also told us he sweats when he eats salty food. And boy did he sweat. We were just sweating over figuring out how to pick up these slurpy noodles with our chopsticks. Fernando just lowered his head to his bowl and shoved them and slurped them into his mouth.

 

Oh, the things you'll see.

 

The Great Wall! It was such a bad weather day when we went, but we hiked to our hearts content. It is so much steeper than you would imagine! How people built this without dying is beyond me. Oh wait, they didn't. When they died their bodies were buried inside the stone walls. Creeeeeepy.

 

Donkey pitas! When I'm not dreaming about the duck I'm wondering how I can ask someone if they know where I can get some donkey meat, without sounding like a weirdo. I don't think that's possible.

It was a quick 3 days but we had so much fun. As always. I don't think I'll ever not have fun with this guy!