Holiday Beijing Day 1

Sunday, July 13, 2008 This morning we got out the door a bit late at 10am because we felt the need (read: Jeannette felt the need) to reorganize our stuff so we knew who had what and where everything was. We started the day right away by walking to the Forbidden City ^[1] and from there on to Tian’anman ^[2] Square ^[2]. We walked over to the Opera House ^[3] for a closer look before taking the subway to the Temple of Heaven ^[4]. Before we could go any further we hit food crisis and popped into an all locals supermarket and pointed at prepared foods from the deli counter for lunch. We got many many smiles as we sat at the nearby tables with the locals to eat straight from the plastic bags. Then we headed into the Temple of Heaven grounds. Josh was certain we needed to view the buildings in the opposite order than we were headed, so we walked through the side gardens first and took many photos Chinese birds and saw many different forms of Chinese exercises occurring. Then we saw the buildings in increasing order of grandness. We headed back to the subway, stopping first at the Pearl Market ^[5] (decidedly not our scene), and went to Ritan Park ^[6] with the Stone Boat Cafe ^[7] where we had drinks and apps and saw a classmate of Josh’s, Pam! From there we subway-ed to Wangfujing ^[8] shopping street and Donghuamen Night Market ^[9] of crazy foods where we parted ways with Pam and returned to Wangfujing where we are having street cafe beers before a nice walk home.

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