Beijing adventures

Beijing is almost nothing like I remember! While there are small alleys and traditional neighborhoods that detour off from the main, wide boulevards, there are with huge modern apartment buildings and malls everywhere. When we were here, I remember that I needed as sweater because it was cold. We had one option – the government friendship store – where to buy it. Now there are clothing stores (including fancy ones like Gucci and Prada) all over the place, car dealerships and fast-food restaurants galore.

We celebrated our arrival with a big Peking duck feast. In fact, we decided to make it our goal to find the best Peking duck in Beijing while we were here. We managed to eat duck for three of the five nights we were here – all different presentations and all delicious. We probably ate more duck here than the kids have eaten in their whole lives!

Our first day out was rainy and cold. We bundled up and headed out for the Forbidden City. It was huge and impressive and definitely consistent with everything we had read about it. We went through building after building and the complex just went on and on. When we were up on the higher buildings it seemed all we could see in the distance were more of the iconic peaked yellow roofs of the palace buildings. While we weren’t quite up on all of our Chinese dynasties, we had recently watched “The Last Emperor,” which was filmed at the Forbidden City and was about the last Qing emperor whose reign ended in 1911 when he was just a boy. It made it even more exciting to recognize the different parts of the palace from the movie and give them little more context, as the whole complex is giant and a little overwhelming.

One night we arranged to go to a Chinese acrobat show. We weren’t really sure whether we had truly arranged it or not as the concierge didn’t speak English very well but he assured us there were tickets waiting for us at the theater. He wrote the name and address of the theater on a card for us to give to the taxi driver who took us to the other side of town (past Tiananmen square) and dropped us in front of one of several acrobat theaters on a small square and directed us to walk down a small alley. We did as we were told (actually were pantomimed to do) and ended it making it to our seats.

The theater was nearly empty when the show started – only about 15 seats filled out of about 100. Despite this, all of the acrobats put on an amazing show and seemed to be really enjoying themselves. The show consisted of about 10 different acts from contortionists to jugglers to girls hanging from wires. All four of us were ooing, aahing and clapping for each act until our hands were sore. Dylan managed to click a few pictures before we were told it was not allowed. Emma and David both now want to be Chinese acrobats.

We had our first Geocaching experience at the Temple of Heaven – it was a blast. I didn’t know anything about it until we met some people on the Great Wall who were really into it. It is basically a treasure hunt using GPS to find the location. When you find the location you log your information and if the cache is large enough, you can leave a little treasure behind. It is a great thing to do with the kids especially. Our school theme this year is navigation and they have learned about latitude and longitude so they can understand how the GPS works to help us find our location.

The cache we found was located right outside of the Temple of Heaven in the fork of a tree. It was hard to be quiet or subtle as we weaved through the trees counting down the distance to the cache on the GPS. This was a very popular cache as we were the fourth group to find it that day! We added our name to the list, GeoGarlands, and then quickly put it back in it’s hiding place and went on our way to the Temple of Heaven. The temple was beautiful but was a little overshadowed from the excitement of our geocache adventure. The kids were already begging to find another.

The afternoon before we left for Xian, we headed for the back lakes area, a part of Beijing located northwest of the Forbidden City. It was very different than the other parts of Beijing we had been in where we had been surrounded by skyscrapers and big busy streets. This area has a few small lakes surrounded by walking paths and bridges. All around the lakes were small restaurants and bars that would have been great in warmer weather. We watched the sun go down and the moon rise as we walked around the lake.

We were surprised to be sad to be leaving Beijing. We hadn’t planned on spending more than about a week here as we thought it would just be crowded and polluted and that week would be more than enough. After a few days however, it had really grown on us. It just felt like a very exciting place to be – it had a energy to it – kind of like Washington DC, where you realize you are in the heart of everything.

The cold weather has certainly been a change for us – it is freezing compared to where we have been – in the low 40s. We are wearing everything warm that we own and are seriously rethinking our plan to spend winter in Europe…Australia and New Zealand might be more our speed.