Megan Emily-Mei: Seriously another awesome day

Another Great Day!

It's been another exhausting, yet fantastic day in China. We started out walking through most of Tiananmen Square. Talk about an enormous area. It's almost unreal. Being a Saturday it was fairly crowded. Our tour guide, Tom, said "if we get separated, just keep heading north, we will find you." Maybe that was his nice way of saying "don't get separated". Luckily nobody got lost. We marched north, past the famous portrait of Chairman Mao and went into the Forbidden City. This area was massive. The original throne of the Emperor is still in one of the buildings. It was very cool. It took us two hours to walk the whole way from Tiananmen Square all the way through the Forbidden City.

Next stop were the rickshaws to take us on a Hutong Tour. We thought riding in a van through the crazy traffic was dangerous. Try it in a little rickshaw. It's amazing they don't have a fatality at every corner. It's almost indescribable. The Hutong area is the oldest area of Beijing, predating the Forbidden City. Our tour guide's name was Potato. He told us it was his English name, not his Chinese name. We're not sure who told him Potato was an English name, but maybe he's seen Papa Grande pitch for the Tigers and just liked the name. The Hutong area is a mix of a hip bar scene (frequented by tourist and college kids at night) and a very old neighborhood. We ate lunch at a family's house. This was the best food we have had, yet. The owner of the house actually live upstairs and is a former chef. He started a very small restaurant (2 tables) in the main floor of the house. It was phenomenal. We're getting better and better with chopsticks at every meal so if we have you over for dinner in the future, be prepared. :)

We had some downtime between the morning touring and the acrobatic show in the afternoon so we strolled down the main street near our hotel with Jeff & Charica. The highlight of the walk was stutter stepping in front of a very large bus. They seriously seem to aim for pedestrians. Unreal. We visited Wu Mart (catchy name, huh?) to see what a Chinese version of Wal-Mart looks like. They pretty much had it all. The coolest part was that it was three stories tall, with escalators that you pushed your shopping cart on.

The acrobatic show was great. It started with a guy stacking about 10 chairs a good 20 feet high. He of course did a bunch of amazing balancing feats up there. It was very scary to watch. One of the middle acts was a group juggling straw hats while doing crazy acrobatics. It was great. The final act consisted of 8 motorcycles spinning in a steel ball. We still don't know how they did it.