Asia

Our pick up time for the bus ride to the airport was at 5:30 a.m. This was probably our shortest night yet. We’ve been laughing about how great it is to be on vacation getting all this “rest.” We always intend to sleep on the plane but I’m not sure a lot of that happens.

The flight from Hong Kong to Beijing was about three hours. Transport to our hotel took longer than we had expected. Beijing is a sprawling city of 13 million. The traffic in all the cities we have visited has been huge. Commuters spend a great deal of time in traffic. There seem to be more bicycles here than in the last cities and it certainly appears to be hazardous. My feeling so far here is that the driving is much more dangerous here. It doesn’t seem as orderly and a lot of horn honking is happening.

Our arranged time to meet our guide Qing was 2:00 p.m. We cut that timeline pretty close! Our first destination was the “dirt” market. We were expecting a dirt floor but I think it was named because things are supposed to be dirt cheap. I’m not sure we found that but there was a lot of junk there!! It is a weekend market and closes up about 5:00 so we didn’t have terribly long there. From there we caught cabs and headed to the “silk” market which was just a huge 5 story mall but all needs to be dickered for. It is PACKED full of people and they are all clamoring for you to buy THEIR stuff. I think this was Sherry and Ernie had been looking forward to the most.

After the shopping was over we took the subway back to the hotel to unload everything and then walked over to a very active street lined with restaurants and stores. We were heading to a very well known restaurant that has been in business since 1923 or so. They are known for their Peking Duck and they stop serving at 9:00. I think we were the last folks inside when we left.

The square was still bustling with people when we were walking back to the hotel.

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