Summary of Saturday, 10/5

We ate the same breakfast buffet Saturday morning. We were scheduled to meet our guide at 8 after breakfast.  We were super excited about this meeting because the Bujnosek family was to meet us there.  They are a family that has been waiting the exact amount of time we have with the very same agency. Tanya and I have communicated quite a bit over the last few months.  It was great to meet this sweet family in person. Tanya and Jason  have a six year old girl, Aubrey, who is precious and affectionate.  She has taken a liking to me and likes to always hold my hand. How cute is that?

After introductions all around, we loaded into the van to head towards the Temple of Heaven.    This was a beautiful temple believed to be where the "God of Heaven" resides.  It has a triple layered tiled roof with the three layers representing deity.  It was gorgeous and showed amazing workmanship. The roof was blue which represents deity, so no other building in China will have blue tiles.

At the Temple of Heaven, I had my first experience with "squatty potties". Basically the toilets are just a hole in the ground.  I have a pic of one.  :). Their standards are quite a bit different and bathroom etiquette is as well. You have to be "on your toes" at some of these bathrooms or you'll never get to go.  The Chinese don't do a lot of waiting in line patiently.  They crowd right outside each stall and if you hesitate a second someone will either jump in front of you or yell at you.  (This may have just been worse due to the increased number of people due to the holiday).  Also many stalls don't have toilet paper. You have to carry tissue with you or in some cases they will have 1 big toilet paper roll outside the main entrance before you go into the men or women's bathrooms.

After the Temple of Heaven, we were taken an hour's drive away to a jade factory set up by the government to educate us about jade. Ok. Now I'm catching on and know what to expect.  They showed us absolutely amazing pieces of art made out of jade. Some were only $60,000 which included shipping. :). We had a man leading throughout telling us about jade and during this we had a hilarious little thing happen. He was explaining some things and somehow his translation got a little jumbled up, and he said something completely inappropriate in English that I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have said if he knew how crude it is in our culture.  But he said it without batting an eye and kept going.  Matt and I looked at each other bug eyed thinking, "Did he just say what I think he said"?   I then got the giggles big time and had to hide behind Matt for a while so I wouldn't seem disrespectful.   They took us into a show room and tried to get us to buy, but again it was overpriced. A jade bangle bracelet was $500.   Not today....

They took us right upstairs for lunch which was filled with other foreigners who were brought there for the jade tour.  We again had family style Chinese with little to drink.  It was good food though.  Our favorite was a spicy chicken and veggie dish.

After lunch we drove another 2 hours away to a pretty section of the Great Wall. Believe it or not, we were 3 hours away from our hotel and still in Beijing.   Now that's a huge city!!  This had to be my favorite sight to see.  This was the less busy section and less visited because  it's more rural and more of a drive.   The view was breathtaking, and the Great Wall was amazing!  We climbed quite a bit and the boys did great.  The steps were old and mostly original, but also very uneven so you couldn't really get your cadence going.  Unfortunately, like most days in Beijing, the smog was very bad so you couldn't see as far as the Great Wall goes, but every time we made it to a new tower, we could see to the next one. I could have spent all day there, but we only had about an hour or so on the wall because we had a 3 hour drive to go back.  We were hoping to toboggan down the wall, but our guide said tours use the cable cars and not the toboggans. ??   The cable cars were super, super steep and I was not crazy at all about riding on those.  I don't know how many feet high we were I the air, but I've never seen a cable car go that high up.

I was completely unprepared for coming down from the cable car.  The merchants are lined up on either side of the path, and they descend on foreigners with a vengeance. I have never, never seen more aggressive salesmen.  They yell at you, block your path, and shove merchandise at you.   I had one lady who literally would not let me by for about a minute.  Every time it tried to go around her, she her arm out and forcefully pushed me back. I finally just stopped and started laughing because I didn't know what else to do.  I tried to get by with one last push and she reluctantly let me by.  Whew!  We did end up buying a couple of small things and their negotiating is like other. They'll start out at about $100 and come down to less than $20 or even less eventually while you're walking away.

The boys were about ready for something not Chinese when we finally made it back to our hotel, so we walked with the Bujnoseks a couple of blocks to the McDonalds near our hotel.  It was pretty close tasting to ours.  Ordering is a bit of a challenge.  You point to a drink and then they give you whatever they want to give you.  I snapped a couple of pics of the menu that because it was so different, but I was chastised for doing so by the manager coming up and firmly saying "no"!  Apparently you can't just take pics of anything you want here.

Luckily we chose to wait until after dinner before visiting famous Snack Street. We would have certainly lost our appetite if we had tried to visit before dinner.  The smells were horrible and stomach turning.  Their choices for sale were grubs on a stick, cocoons, scorpions, seahorse, squid, kidney, liver, intestines, etc.  They were grilled out at booths and then sold on a stick.  Our two families were definitely the only Americans, but the locals were forming lines at the booths.  The vendors would also hold out their fare for you to look and smell and say something trying to get you to buy it.  We weren't the least bit tempted.  In fact, after being there for about 5 minutes the boys were asking to go back because they couldn't handle the smells.   We made ourselves walk most of the way down it and then walked back to the hotel to turn in.

That was the end of another very busy day.