Forbidden City and Apocalyptic Skies

Kurt arrived on his birthday after having traveled in Europe for several weeks. Luckily I was feeling better and was able to bake him a cake and show him around a bit on his first day. He did not have a whole lot of jetlag, but we kept the first couple days pretty light. Unfortunately the entire time he was here, Beijing was horribly polluted, so his first impressions were not so good.

The second day in Beijing we went to the Forbidden City and the Lama Temple. The Forbidden City was pretty cool, however the sky was nasty the entire day with all the thick pollution just hanging around. The Lama Temple was cool to see again, however it was more crowded and there were no performances.

The third day we pretty much stayed indoors because it looked like the apocalypse outside and we did not want to breathe it in. It was so disgusting outside, so we unfortunately missed out on doing anything too exciting. It was good to rest though since we had to leave early the next morning for Shanghai. I did take Kurt to Yashow, a shopping market with all kinds of clothing, shoes, bags, beads, Chinese goodies. Most of the clothing and shoes are fakes, actually I don't know if any of it is real, but some stuff is definitely better quality. At any rate, there were lots of people and everyone is trying to get your money and hassling you. It was a bit much, so we did not last too long. That night we went to dinner with Jen, the other roommate who I only knew for a couple weeks but got along really well with. We went to a Korean restaurant and had hot pot.