Beijing Day 1

Beijing has been a whirl wind true Keira Travel Style. We arrived at the airport safe and sound after our two hour flight from Seoul. We were all a little spent from our weekend of celebrating and saying goodbye to Korea, as well as, hello for the two new Canadians joining the adventures, my brother, Spencer and his sweet girlfriend, Sasha.

We got to the airport in Bejing and the first thing we see is a Starbucks and KFC... apparently Beijing will be a lot more Westernized than Korea! Apart from the glaring Western Franchises was a sign with our names on it. Airport pickup to our hotel. I love being taken care of. No worries and we were off. We passed the multiude of brown, yellow, and various colored 70-80's style taxi cabs and threw our oversized heay backpacks into the back of a van. The sights were exactly how I imagined large city China to be. Varied archietecture (different from Korea), Olympic banners everywhere, many cars, bicycles dashing in between vehicles, and little "taxi" bikes. Awesome!

Our hotel is three star but feels like 5 plus. Great bedding nice rooms, showers!!! SO not backpacker style. The breakfast this morning was unbelieveable. Fried noodle, egg, fried rice, strange vinegared salad like vegetables, and spring rolls.. oh and real brewed coffee!!!
I am getting ahead of myself though. Our first day consisted of us arriving about 2 pm and not really knowing what to do with ourselves as the tours were booked for the next two days. Luckily, I have read lots about Beijing quickly ran to the internet and found a couple things for us to go and do easily. We wandered in a shopping area- Silk Street and Pearl Market. A couple of silk clothing/scraves were for sale but we didn't see any pearls. Instead we walked up and down markets of knock off bags and name brand shoes where pushy Chinese people kept beckoning "Hey Lady you like my bag?... I give you good price." The English here is 400 times better than that in Korea. The kids (Spencer and Sasha) ate McDonalds saying it was a must as McDonalds sponsered the Olympics and apparently everyone had to eat it here during the Olympics. Roberta and I (equally as bad but I pretend better) enjoyed some Starbucks and we just wandered with no real plan. Best sort of travel. Saw some jade carvings, bought some amazing flower jasmine tea where you literally drink the tea with a flower in your cup.

It was getting a little dark at this point but I really wanted to see these 'Hangtons' I read about. Old ancient small stone houses, no plumbing that are trying to be preserved in the metropolis that is growing in and around the city of Beijing. We found them and were we ever glad we did. Surrounding this area was this amazing lake with weeping willows growing all around and candlelight restaruants up and down the walkway. Seriously romantic and naturally gorgeous. We spent hours walking around snapping photos. Spencer did some shopping and bought a decent looking mask though the shopping will have to end here as there is no room in our bags!!!

Roberta and I were finally getting famished so we ate some sweet and sour chicken and fried rice noodle. Surpirsingly the food seems to be quite similar to our Western idea of Chinese food... though I can't believe they eat this all the time or they would be 100000 pounds. After this we finally went back and to bed.