3.09.2008

Beijing Part 2

I realize this is taking a while... But when you think it took Swift at least 5 years to write Gulliver's Travels, then it's not so bad...

So after the Forbidden City, we headed toward The Great Wall, which is about an hour's drive north of Beijing, and made a brief (or not so brief) stop at a jade "museum"... Curiously, this "museum" had quite a few pieces of jade for sale... Hmm....

Anyway, Emma bought a very nice jade ring (which was promptly destroyed a week later by an errant high five and a smooch with a Tungsten Carbide wedding band during a post-strike bowling celebration) and Joe bought a "Happy Family Jade Ball" which is a ball with several independent layers carved out of a single piece of jade... S'cool...

On our way to the The Great Wall, our bus stopped at a really touristy souvenir shopping mall for lunch... Curiously, whenever we had no control over our own transportation, the tour bus kept taking us to shopping areas... Hmm...

Lunch was good... It was a variety of family style Chinese dishes on a lazy susan... They also gave us a free bottle of what can best be described as "The Worst Tasting Alcohol That Has Ever Existed In The History Of Mankind"... I know what you're thinking... No, it wasn't a bottle of Paramount Rum, it was some horrific turpentine-y terribleness... Perhaps it was liquidized Beijing smog... No idea... All's I know is we didn't even drink it when it was free and I will never drink it again...

After lunch, we curiously had about an hour before the bus was going to be back to pick us up... Hmm... An hour to kill in a huge souvenir store... Hmm.... I wonder what we were supposed to do... Hmm....

After aimlessly walking around the souvenir shop wishing they sold Snickers bars, we were finally on our way to The Great Wall...

After walking on The Great Wall, I think a more befitting moniker would be "The Tall Walkway Where Souvenir Vendors Constantly Annoy You And Slowly Destroy China's Cultural Heritage"... The less said about The Great Wall, the better... Ask me sometime when I've had a few beers and I'll recount the tale much like I do with the "Ding Dong, Willard's Dead" story... Right now all thinking about it does is piss me off...

After T.T.W.W.S.V.C.A.Y.A.S.D.C.C.H., we went to a small tea shop and got a nice schpeal about the different kinds of tea in China, and how they are properly made and drank... And then made our way to a Peking Duck dinner... Yum!

The dinner was good! Lots of different dishes with a variety of tastes... Again, they were served family style and on a lazy susan... We shared our dinner table (as we had done at lunch) with 4 Japanese college guys who were in our tour group...

After munchy-wunch-wunching on AFLAC's spokesperson, we headed back to the hotel for some hotubbing, Tsingtao beers, and risque photography... All in all it was a very eventful day!

I realize this blog post is ridiculously long... Thanks to those who made it all the way to the end!

Coming soon, Part 3!

1 comment:

Sarah said...

Heh, heh... that post was a lot of LOLOL. Yep, out loud. True story. In particular the cultural crumbling of the Great Wall. ** sigh **