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The Hotel (continues): breakfast wasn’t included. We nixed the idea of hunting breakfast elsewhere as my father suggested and just added it to our room…100 RMB…which roughly equals 12 USD. All you can eat buffet…mix of Asian and American…you wouldn’t know how interesting it is to eat a steamed pork bun right along side of a stack of silver dollar pancakes until you try. Take note…syrup does not go well with steamed pork bun.
Observations: today started out…not so auspiciously. Apparently, the plug for our hair dryer is not a converter like most of our other electronic products…therefore, I blew a fuse in the room. Go figure, that wasn’t good. Okay onwards to start the day…bellhop hailed a cab for us…okay, so it looks a little rickety, but it should be okay right? Well, that’s what we thought. Again, go figure…I was wrong. 10 minutes out of the hotel, the cab died…actually started smoking while driving, which well…wasn’t good. Thank god we didn’t take that one to the Wall…got out of that one, switched to another, newer looking cab. We negotiated with the driver to take us to the wall, summer palace and or the forbidden city. All for the bargain price of 600 RMB. Alright, so here we go…an hour to the Wall right? Well, not so much…we were in the second cab for not longer than 5 minutes when he committed a traffic booboo, and was pulled over. Obviously, he was getting a ticket that he couldn’t talk his way out of…so he asked us to excuse him for a moment while he “confers” with the police…here’s what I saw. I saw him arguing, pointing, jumping…essentially doing everything to keep from getting a ticket…he then pulled on the cop’s sleeve to show him something…that turns out to be a really big booboo. The cop took major offense, started screaming, calling for backup…so here’s now 3 more cops…all surrounding our driver. More arguing…more pointing, out comes the night stick…so now I’m thinking damn…we’ve got to get another cab cause this guy’s going to be arrested in a few seconds…god was trying to tell us something, and we obviously weren’t getting the message…but the arrest was averted, and we went on our way, with ticket to the driver.
So now we’re finally headed to the Wall. An hour drive later brought us to the mountains, where we climbed half way up on the Wall (pictures to follow). The view was magnificent, breath-taking, (insert superfluous adjective here). The stairs presented an almost vertical drop, yet we braved it. In consideration of time, we exited after only an hour and a half. Along the Wall, there were vendors selling the generic souvenir items…we rejected all their advances to sell us the trinkets…it wasn’t until we got down to ground level did I find out that those people up there has to carry everything they’re to sell up to their carts every morning…then bring it all back down at night…the thing I guess that made me feel a little better is not that I was rejecting the little people…you know, mom and pop who has to do this or else they wouldn’t survive…they’re all part-timers…the real owners never even show up.
Okay, so from the Wall, we trek back to the city. Here we encounter lots of traffic, and the original plan of going to the Summer Palace was thwarted. So we quickly decided that we would just do the Forbidden Palace first, then the Summer Palace tomorrow…turned out to be a good idea.
In the Forbidden Palace we did a quickie tour, 90 minutes to walk the length of it…okay, so we saw nothing in depth…but it was magnificent. It seems unreal that all of that, belonged to one person…it’s almost unfathomable. There are lots of thought I had about the Forbidden City, but that will have to come in another entry.
By the time we walked through the whole City, and reached Tiananmen Square, we were both frozen solid, both from the actual cold, from being exhausted with the climb, and just having been out the whole day…so we headed back to the hotel. At this point, we should mention that we haven’t eaten anything since breakfast, and are now starving…so my hunt was for Peking Duck…I mean where else are you going to go for good Peking duck than in Beijing??
So, we asked around, and found this one restaurant that was extraordinarily famous…into the cab we go to the restaurant for some takeout (couldn’t imagine sitting at the table for food at this point) – so this was another fiasco. The cab driver told the bellhop he knew where he was going…turned out he lied…so he dropped us off at some random place, and told us to go look for it ourselves…angry at this, we walked around the plaza where he dropped us off…turns out to be a pedestrian mall…which we ended up shopping at for a little bit. We finally found the restaurant, bought an entire duck, and went back to the hotel…the duck was absolutely amazing, to die for, and never to be duplicated. Alexis had lasagna from room service since the duck just wasn’t up her alley. Crashed at 9 while Rome was screaming at us via the television.
…TO BE CONTINUED…