Back in Beijing

We arrived back in Beijing at around 7 AM and joined the masses that were also returning. We came to the apartment, did laundry, checked emails and went to "The Olive" for lunch. It's kind of funny how I have become sort of a "regular" there. The waiter came up to us and asked if we had been there before, when I said I had been he said he recognized me. I think he was trying to practice his English and how to be polite by asking us a bunch of questions. It was pretty cool.

After lunch we went to the Summer Palace. Unfortunately the sky was really "smoky" as the weather describes it, so the view was not that great. Even with the less than amazing view, it was still nice to walk around and imagine what it must have been like back in the day. We were lucky enough to see a musical performance in the old theatre. For dinner we wanted to do Peking Duck, so we found this wild Chinese restaurant. They had all kinds of weird things there. Turtle soup, sea cucumber and all kinds of things I can't even remember, but let's just say it was hard to find things on the menu that I was interested in eating. The Peking Duck was quite tasty as was the fried octopus (or was it calamari?). They gave complimentary desserts, so you can imagine I was excited. Eeeek! It was horrible! We ordered one of each since there were three of us (Carrie came as well). One was some tofu cubes in a liquid, another was some black jelly (we think maybe squid ink?) and then other was some kind of porridge. They were all equally foul.

That night Alex got back from her trip to Xiahe and so we all went to Alfa (a bar/club) to catch up. Kurt and I wanted to go to the Great Wall but did not know how to get there without paying a lot for a taxi. Julie has a driver that she uses and she told us that she would call him and arrange it. Sure enough the next morning, the driver picked us up and drove us out to Simatai. It was a very cloudy and misty day unfortunately, but Simatai looks amazing even in the fog. We heard that there is a tabogan at Simatai that you can take down, but we could not find it anywhere. My only thought is that Lonely Planet is wrong and it is actually on another part of the wall. We were pretty disappointed, but it was still an amazing day.

We took the cable car up so that we could spend more time on the wall. For good and for bad, we went on an uncrowded day. The good thing about it is obviously that there are less people, the bad thing is that the hagglers focus in on you and follow you the entire way. Luckily we managed to shake one off and enjoy the rest of our hike. We made peanut butter and nutella sandwiches for lunch, which I have now named "The Great Wall Sandwich" since I made it the last time I climbed the Great Wall. Kurt and I noticed that I put a ton more nutella and peanut butter on mine, go figure!

That evening we went to Red Rose, the Xinjiang restaurant, with Alex and Julie. They had belly dancing and a band and it was a good time until the snake came out. I totally forgot that the belly dancers sometimes bring a snake out, and Julie is deathly afraid of snakes. As soon as she saw it she freaked out and had to leave the restaurant.

The following day Kurt and I went to do some shopping at the market that had opened across the street and then I took him to the airport.