Saturday, January 11, 2014

In Which We Go Shopping

So, our last day in China was pretty good. It was really relaxed, which I'll never complain about. The first place we went was the Beijing bell and drum towers near our hotel. We didn't go inside of them, because we figured that bell and drum towers are probably a lot like Buddhist temples; (though for some reason we keep visiting Buddhist temples) if you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all. Here are a couple pictures we took of the outsides.

Bell tower.

Drum tower.
Then we went to the last of the big Beijing sights that we hadn't seen yet: the Temple of Heaven. It's in  a park, and our guidebook said it was a good place for people watching. If by "people watching" they meant "seeing old people dancing" then they were right. There were a bunch of them. Anyway, the park is built around the old temple that the Emperor had for worshiping heaven and praying for good harvests. According to the signs, it was a fairly convoluted process, but the buildings were pretty cool. Here are some pictures.

This building is called The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. Despite its long name,
it's a pretty cool building.


Nancy was pretty pleased that she managed to get this picture with only me in it.

They really liked their round buildings here.





After the Temple of Heaven we headed out to do what we really had planned: shopping. I wasn't overly excited about it, because, as I mentioned in my post on day 2 in Xi'an, I found that I wasn't a huge fan of Chinese markets. We went to two. The first one was called the Silk Market, and one nice thing about it was that it was indoors. There were very few merchants who would let you walk by without saying something to you like, "Hey, you need shoes? Come buy!" or "Scarves! Buy scarves!" or, one of my favorites (which was said to Nancy): "Hey, you! Tell you husband buy you something nice!" I guess that guy saw our wedding rings. After the Silk Market we went to another clothes market, and actually found a couple things that we wanted. We got Nancy a nice thick coat for only 25 dollars. Nancy had decided that she didn't need it, and we were walking away, but the lady kept on yelling lower prices at us, and when she said 150 yuan we were like, "Eeeeeeeeeh, okay." and went and bought it. There were a lot of really good-looking North Face and Columbia jackets and shoes in there, but I had to remember that I already have more jackets and shoes than I really know what to do with, besides the fact that they wouldn't have my shoe size. (That's one of the problems you run into as a big person living in Asia.) And also that I have some of the best canyoneering shoes on the market in our storage unit back in Utah. I also looked at a few "Rolex" watches, but we decided that I couldn't really drop more than 20 dollars on one because I can get a watch for that at Wal-mart in the US that would look just as good and probably be higher quality. Overall, the markets were a pretty fun experience. You get used to being yelled at after a while.

For dinner that night we decided that we had to try the capitol's signature dish: Peking Duck. We went to a restaurant that our guidebook recommended and it was really good! We even took a couple pictures of it, and I'm usually not in the habit of taking pictures of food. Here they are.

The chef would come out and hack it up next to your table.

This is what it looked like cut up.

With all the trimmings. We were trying it just plain before they brought us this stuff, and one of the waiting staff told us to stop (we tried it plain anyway). We weren't sure what to do, but as near as we could tell, you were supposed to take one of those little tortilla things and put some duck that you dipped in that dark sauce (which, btw, was delicious) and then put in a cucumber and some of the other vegetable (I wasn't sure what it was) and them make kind of a burrito out of it. We ordered the dumpling separately. We got two. We thought they would be normal sized because they were only 8 yuan each (just over a dollar). Then they brought them and they were huge! I liked them, though. Nancy didn't really. Anyway, the duck was really good.
Anyway, that's the story of our day, including our dinner. It was pretty fun. The next morning we got on the plane and flew back to Korea, which felt great. Coming back to Korea feels like coming home these days. It's nice to be able to read again, even if I don't know what I'm reading. So, that's our trip to China! I'll put up a post with my overall thoughts soon. That's it for this one. This is Captain Danger out.

2 comments:

  1. I bet even if you do end up buying a watch at wal-mart, it'll still be made in China ;)

    Love reading your blog!

    ReplyDelete