Beijing, Day 1

Today was our first full day in Beijing, and it was a busy day at that! We started off pretty early, since neither of us slept late due to the time difference, and headed downstairs for breakfast. The breakfast at the hotel was so delicious, and consisted of dim sum, pastries, fruits, and western style breakfast items.

Our first stop of the day was the Forbidden City, and it's definately named that for a reason - because it's GIGANTIC like a mini city. We spent several hours wandering around there and checking out all the buildings and gardens. Each building has a name, such as the Hall of Cumulative Purity - but the names seem to have nothing to do with what is actually inside of the buildings. The whole place was amazing, and after walking around for so long there, my feet are killing me!! Oh - one really strange/interesting thing is that several Chinese people actually came up and asked to take pictures WITH me!

After that, we walked to Tianeman Square and took some pictures and got approached by about a zillion tour guides trying to sell us tours to the Great Wall (which we are going to do tomorrow). I didn't mind talking with them, but some of them were annoyingly pushy.

Once we finished there, we searched for a really long time for a place to eat lunch and eventually found a little restaurant a few blocks away. This was our first time eating at a restaurant in the city, so we were both a little nervous. But ultimately, it was totally fine and we ordered without any problems. In fact, the waitresses were all giddy and acting like school girls actually fighting to get to take my order. Apparently I am hot stuff here in China - who knew?!

For lunch, I had a pretty interesting meal:

• rice
• steamed pumpkin cakes
• candied potato wedges
• donkey and scallion stir fry

Yep...I ate DONKEY for lunch!!! It was actually quite tasty too! (It kind of freaked Katie out a little though haha) Lunch made me think of the Donkey from Shrek haha

Once we finished lunch, I had my first terrifying experience in the super gross public restrooms here, and then we took a taxi to the Temple of Heaven. By the time we got there, the temple buildings were already closed, but we were still allowed to go into the huge park and look at the outside of them.

By this point in the day, we were both pretty tired and it was getting quite cold, so this was fine for us. The grounds were amazing and filled with these strange bendy trees, which looked so eerie in the fog/smog. We walked around and saw most of the sights, but as the sun quickly set, we suddenly found ourselves completely in the dark in the spooky woods in China! To be honest, it was more than a little creepy, and we hauled ass to get out of there as quickly as possible, and then took a taxi back to our hotel. The whole thing made me think of the spooky forest from Harry Potter haha.

We are both pretty tired at this point, so I don't know that we'll do too much tonight, but so far, we are having a great time and haven't gotten on each other's nerves too bad yet. Beijing is a cool place so far despite the terrible smog and the traffic rules that seem to be more of suggestions here and make even riding in a taxi a near death experience. In fact, the language barrier hasn't even been that bad!

Anyway, here are some pictures from today: