CHINA - BEIJING (part one)

It has been a LONG time since I travelling without children and it was amazing!  Not the part where I missed them, but the part where I only took a little backpack for a week and got to watch movies on the plane and eat before my food was cold! It was so nice and relaxing.  My flight leaving Brisbane was delayed for 4 hours, so instead of me having to wait a few hours for Amy to arrive in Beijing, she had to wait for me, lucky girl.  It had been about 9 months since I saw her last and it was so nice to see her!!  We were ready for our adventure.  We took the train in and then transferred over to the subway to our destination - Llama Temple Station.  We walked for a bit and eventually found our Hutong, with lead to our AirBnB, which was in a neat little back alley.  Then we explored!  The area we were staying was really neat!  Lots of people out and about and everything was just so foreign and neat to us.  And wow super nice cars everywhere!!  I have never seen more Teslas, Mercedes and BMWs in one place in my life!

It was hard to find any food that looked edible (mostly just scary looking meat in windows) and we were so tired from our flights that we just crashed pretty early.  We had a Beijing City Tour scheduled for the next day and we were getting picked up at like 6:30am so we needed our beauty sleep!  As usual blogger has decided to upload my pictures in random order... oh well.

Temple of Heaven

A picture at the Forbidden City with almost no one else in it? A miracle!

Random strangers would thrust their children at Amy to have their pictures taken with her (also random people too, the white girl is not just for children!)

We opted for the cheaper tour which included mandatory stops along the way, like this chinese medicine school where a doctor would come in and check your pulse (with three fingers because that is the proper way to do it) and have you stick out your tongue and then through a translator would tell you your diagnosis, followed by a forceful "do you want the medicine?!?" of course it was for a ridiculous price and who knows what it actually is... good entertainment though!  We also got to soak our feet in some brown liquid and get a foot massage for $2

Last stop was the Summer Palace!  We had almost no time there because we had to go to a pearl factory first (dang cheap tour!) but we loved it so much we took the subway back the next day (to be recounted in part two!)

No international vacation is complete without McDonalds ice cream!

Again at the Summer Palace

Going home through the back alley 

A lion you might think? Nope, a dragon! 

Forbidden City gardens, the emperor had like 2000 concubines, so they needed somewhere to hang out! 

Luckily most signs had english as well!

Amy managed a super cool heart bun! 

There was this one really neat area of Beijing, where there was a huge mall and the crazy food market and a blocked off street filled with people hanging out.  So many people out all the time! Late at night! With their children! Maybe because their homes are all small apartments they need to get out? Its a theory... 

I felt like I needed to take a picture on my stopover in Hong Kong and this rubber duck made out of cans was the winner!

And then I took another picture as well... it was so smoggy there you could barely see anything!

The back ally to our house

I had to take a Tesla picture for Andrew, its his dream car.  There were so many of them!

Lots of entrances to everything had these cool things over top - not sure what they're called? 

People people everywhere!

Forbidden City 

There was a crush of people to get a look inside - it was seriously ridiculous like you were body checking old ladies out of the way and they were merciless back!  I'm surprised no one was trampled to death no jokes. 

And this was what was inside - a throne?

The mall had a freshly squeezed orange juice maker - so yum!

At the big mall we had to do it to be cool! 

Crazy food market selling all sorts of crazy things like fried scorpions and beetles and other random bugs and sea creatures and just really anything.... we weren't adventurous because we didn't want to get sick and I don't even regret it

YUM!!!

Well that was about it for our city tour!  We did a lot of driving through the city to get places and that's always fun!  Beijing is a lot more spread out than I imagined and there is a lot of green space and trees.  I though it was going to be a concrete jungle for real!