Beijing, Day 1

Preview:

We decided to go to China when we realized we had a week off for the Korean holiday

Cheosok. The only problem was that we didn’t want to plan a trip so soon after getting back from Japan. Feeling lazy, we looking online and-lo and behold- we found a 4 day package trip to Beijing! And that brings us to our trip.

Day 1

We arrived in China to our first ever experience of having someone holding a sign with our names on it. It was very exciting and a wonderful way to start our journey. Our tour group is only 5-us and three other NSETS from Korea. Our tour guide is a Chinese woman who’s English name is Wendy. She’s lovely. She herded us to our van and we met our driver, Mr Saun

CHINESE CIRCUS SHOP

We started day one with a Chinese Circus Show at the Heaven and Earth theater. It was a wonderful show in a charming little rundown theather. We saw general acrobatics made more exciting with the use of Diablo and spinning plates. We saw

a balancing act where a 10 year old girl was thrown (and then balanced) onto a three high tower of men. The three main attractions were a juggler, umbrella juggling, and a bicycle act. The juggler bounced, at one point, 9 balls-WHILE tapdancing. The umbrella juggler spun four umbrellas, one in each foot and hand, and the bicycle act had 12 women on one bicycle! It was a fun way to start our evening.

DINNER

Afterward we were taken to dinner. We had duck. Apparently the way the duck is prepared is very special. They are all smoked in a huge oven, many many ducks together. They have no

seasoning added so they use fruit tree wood to smoke the duck and when it comes out it gets cut into exactly 120 pieces. The duck has three layers of delicious. 1^st layer-skin, 2^nd layer-fat, and 3^rd layer-meat. It’s an excellent combination! They serve it with a thick version of soy sauce (imagine the consistency of A-1). We at our dinner and then went to wonder in our area.

NIGHTTIME WANDERINGS

At the end of our street is a lovely church and on the black stone steps in front of the church this man was using water to paint words. He wasn’t using a small paintbrush, it was a large-almost comically sized brush. Imagine the size of a child’s broom. Anyway, the whole processwas beautiful because the water made the stones a nice dark color but by the time he got to the the last step the words on the first step would begin to fade and he would start again. He had three paintbrushes so periodically people on the street would add their words to his.

After watching him for a while we went on a hunt for a sweatshirt. China is cold! Apparently they’ve gone from 90 degrees to 60 in a week! Anyway, we needed to find Jamie a sweatshirt so we braved the mall, found a department store with a hugely aggressive woman who sold us a nice long sleeve shirt for more than half the original price she quoted us.

Warm and ready for adventure we wandered out into the night, found us a little beer stand and drank a beer while watching the female weightlifting championships that were being shown on a massive screen on one of the buildings. When we tired of that we decided to brave the night food market. WOW! Live scorpions on sticks, starfish, flayed geckos, duck fetus, and seahorses-I think that’s the end of the crazy list. Everything else was pretty normal, but it was so crowded that it felt like a fair. We wanted to try the scorpion but had no camera. Soon. Soon.