Beijing Arrival

Things didn’t get too much better once we got to Beijing and tried to call the man who was going to meet us at the subway. We were unable to figure out the weird pay phones, but a nice subway employee saw us having trouble and offered us her cell phone. Well, that was great, but then he didn’t answer the phone! We didn’t know what to do, so we got back on the subway and tried to find a stop with a Starbucks or McDonalds that had internet. We finally got through to him and met him back at the original subway stop.

Next, it was more bad news. The school we were planning on going to in Guilin decided that they only have enough students and money to employ one teacher. Since we don’t want to be split up, this wasn’t going to work for us. Currently, we are hanging out in Beijing waiting to hear if there is a school somewhere in China that will hire both of us to teach. It is looking like we will end up in the Beijing area, but things are still up in the air.

The good thing to come out of this is that the agency helping us is providing us with a hotel and we have the days free to explore this large city. It blows my mind how many people are here. There are nearly 18 million people living in Beijing, that’s almost half the size of California! Our first day was spent recovering from the train ride and trying to figure out where we were exactly. We ventured out to find a place to eat and had to go just off pointing to pictures of food. This is the first place we have been with absolutely no English anywhere. The next day we managed get on the correct busses and subways and found ourselves in Tiananmen Square. We took a tour of the Forbidden City, which is where the Emperor’s of China lived with their Empress and concubines for around 500 years:


The Forbidden City is huge, with multiple palaces and temples, and we could have easily spent more than one day there:

The day ended with a quest to find internet, since our hotel doesn’t have any. We were successful, but it’s annoying since we have to lug a computer around with us. The next day we headed back to Tiananmen Square but found it was all roped off because of a Chinese Government meeting:

We walked around the edge of the square and down a street that was hosting The Lantern Festival. Colorful lanterns hung as far as we could see:

As we were entering we passed a sign showing all the things you aren’t allowed to do here. The funniest ones are “No Juggling” and what we thought was “No Love” but looks like it is actually “No drawing on the wall”:
Our city walk ended at the Temple of Heaven:

We got there too late to go into the temple itself, but it is surrounded by a huge park that we enjoyed walking around and observing people practicing Tai Chi:
The temple is beautiful, like most of the old buildings here, and full of color.

Today we decided to go to the Beijing Zoo, mainly because we wanted to see some pandas! We saw lots of pandas, as well as almost every other animal imaginable from all over the world, including tigers, lions, bears, and hippos:

Besides the bitterly cold weather we had a great day. Despite the cold and snow on the ground, we luckily have not had it rain or snow on us at all since we have arrived in China. Not sure how much longer we can go though.

We were brave this evening and tried our first food from a street vendor. It just looked too delicious to pass up so we decided to risk our health. We had a pancake with egg, onions, and some strange sauce. It was so good! There are people on every corner selling sausages, pancakes, corn, and potatoes from grills attached to their bicycles. The one thing we can’t figure out is this foul smelling food that looks like fermented tofu but seriously smells like moldy wet dog. I can’t even get close enough to figure out what is because the smell is so bad. We are hoping to get some good news soon about our teaching situation so we can get to work!