Beijing Adventure Part III

We were fed SO much on the trip that I started to wonder how Chinese people stay so small!  For most of the meals the food was placed on a large Lazy Susan type thing in the middle of a table of 8 to 10 people.  They would keep bringing out dish after dish (some that we could recognize and some that we couldn't) until the table was so overloaded that you had to balance the dishes on the edges of the layer below.  Everyone would just spin the Lazy Susan and grab whatever they wanted with their chopsticks when it went by.  They also served yummy hot green tea at every meal.

  Here is Hubs enjoying one of the spreads!

One evening our tour guide also took us to "Wangfujing Street"  a famous strip of street vendors that sells pretty much any kind of food/weird thing you can image on a stick.

Here is a close up to give you a better idea.  I"m not sure what everything was but the little brown ones in the middle are silk worms and the two on the far right hand side are squid tentacles and baby octopus respectively.  Yum! :)

Oh and I almost forgot the starfish and sea urchins!

We had already eaten so "unfortunately" only had room to try the strawberry and kiwi crystallized in sugar.

Beijing Adventure Part II

The second day of our trip we went to the Great Wall of China!!!  It was so surreal to actually be there!

We could see where there have been some repairs and restoration done to the original structure but for the most part, the section where we were at had been preserved very well.   People are doing a good job of protecting the cultural relics.  And caltaral relics too whatever they are. :)

In the area where we were, there were two parts open for tourists to climb.  We took what our tour guide called the "hard" side.  He should be referring to it as the Stair Master Supreme Side.  The stairs were STEEP!  And uneven.  See Hubs on the left side just above the waving Asian woman (or was she falling. .hmm. . )?

Those stairs were in the first 1/4 of the climb.  The number of people on the stairs decreased dramatically the higher we went.  As did our energy to take out the camera. :)  The stairs kept curving around as they went higher so we thought that we could see the end but when we reached that point there was another 200 steps to go.  Then when when reached that point there was a few more hundred.  Then when when we reached that point. .  okay you get the idea.:)

Here I am VERY relieved to be "at the top"

And Hubs too! (doesn't he look like he is on a postcard?)

We were so tired from walking all the way up there that Hubs tried out a different route to get down.