Sunday, August 22, 2010

A week in Beijing.

Okay… so as I mentioned… we hit China on the way to Bali.


From A week in Beijing


Here's Janet with some thoughts about our time there.


...

Our Novotel hotel was near Wangfujing (Beijings ‘ramblas’), so we headed over on our fist night to stretch our legs after our long flight from Vancouver. There were large billboards written in English reminding locals that filling out the census was of great importance in order to run the country. The wording was intense, reminded me of Cuba. 1.4 Billion people can’t be wrong Mr. Harper.


From A week in Beijing


We pushed our way through a very crowded shopping street revealing this country for what it is, a capitalist dictatorship.

Rising most mornings at 2:00 a.m. we visited the top sites for as long as the kids could manage. The Great Wall (we went to Mutianyu), The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Tiantan park (where the kids played a racquet sport with a local), Yashow Market, the Temple of Heaven, The Pearl Market. We also saw an acrobat show at the Chaoyang Theatre, visited the Lama Temple, The Drum Tower, The Silk Market and The Olympic pool (The Cube)......we journeyed through a Hutong by bike and had fantastic food massages. We ate roasted duck at Da Dong (NY Times best rated restaurant in Beijing) in under 30 minutes, shared a mongolian hot pot, hit up a western style cafe called Caribou where the kids ate bowl after bowl of penne and I drank my first latte in days, we chowed down on fantastic food at both Jin Ding Xuan (cantonese) and Din Tai Fung (dumplings).
By weeks end our lungs were thick with smog (they call it Grey-jing) and we were all hacking and had sore throats. We were tired of the traffic, fatigued by the harassment in the markets, done with Myles and Austin posing for photos and ready to see something green (I scouted for a bird the whole week and never saw one).

But we’re glad we went… China is unlike any other place. And that’s cool.

It was also good because it made the kids eager to see some green after all the grey.

Bring on Bali! We chanted...

And best of all for Peter, it allowed him to finish his film, Digging, which will be up here in a few days.

Click on the photo below to go to an album of photos (with captions) from China:

A week in Beijing

All for now...

Janet (and Peter)


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