What you notice first in Beijing is the traffic. OMG. What I didn’t know was that we would end up spending hours and hours on that bus in traffic that’s like the Kennedy Expressway heading out of the city at 7:00a. Ugh.
The other thing you notice is people spitting everywhere. Men, women…doesn’t matter. They spit everywhere. It’s not the most charming thing about China.
Beijing is also drab and dingy and crowded. But…then there’s all that history. On this day (there was no way to know what actual day it was) we went to the Great Wall which was started in the 5th century B.C. and finished in the 17th century A.D. and is somewhere around 5000 miles long. We climbed 400 steps (I climbed it in fashion boots with heels, and was the first one to the top).
We ate all our meals off of gigantic lazy susans in the middle of the table and they would bring dish after mediocre dish of various stir-fried foods. Some of it was really good but most of it was okay. One night we had a dumpling dinner where they brought dish after dish of delicious dumplings filled with imaginative and wonderful stuffings. Mostly, tho, the food was not memorable, probably because we were frequenting the type of restaurant that could accommodate large groups of tourists, generally not where you go for gourmet meals.
More pictures of Beijing, including the Olympic stadium and the dragon building.
Stay tuned…the next day we moved on to Xian.
Here are the rest of the posts:
Part 1
No comments:
Post a Comment