Day 1: Beijing, China

Hello all!!

Well, the last 2 days have been quite the experience. Since we have limited time in Beijing, we have been packing in the sights and activities. At the hostel, we are staying in a 4 bed dorm room, and we only took up three of the four beds. The person in the fourth bed was an Austrian girl who has been teaching English in Shanghai for the past 2 months. She is fluent in German, English, and Spanish and can speak a bit of Chinese. We made friends with with her the first evening, and she accompanied us today. This made ordering things from menus, getting around the city, and purchasing tickes much easier. In general, communication with the locals happend, which was amazing!!

Today we tried to do many of the tourist sights. We took in The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square (so BIG! and very sterile feeling), the Olympic Venues (Bird's Nest, Water Cube, which we could only see the venues from blocks away as there was so much construction. That was a little dissatisfying. We wanted to get up close and personal with the venues), an authentic Chinese lunch (the best dish was the bean curd, which accompanied many other unrecognizable meats and veggies which we ordered off of a picture menu with the help of our room mate from the hostel, an Austrian who speaks a bit of Chinese) and to finish off the evening we ate Beijing Duck.

The best sight of the day was by far the Forbidden City. We didn't expect the city to be so large, and we lucked out. We were not packed in like sardines, and we were able to be the only people in some of the large open spaces. This allowed us to explore the City without much distractions from the hundred's of Chinese tourists. It was quite the experience, and kind of crazy to think back to the time, hundreds of years ago, when the Emperor was there.

The second best experience of the day was dinner. We ventured across town to a 6 story Peking Duck restaurant. Quanjude was established in 1864 and it serves very tasty duck! The restaurant that we ate at was very swanky, with private rooms (which we didn't get to eat in, we had to share a largeish room with other patrions). The restaurant is similar to McDonald's, as the tell you how many millions of ducks they've served since its opening... Our duck's number was 115, 608, 066. And what a tasty duck it was!