Momentary Musings: Beijing, China

The second week of my trip to Asia took me to Beijing, China. What a culture shock after Thailand. It was freezing cold, and the people were pretty rude. Also, almost no one spoke English, (And I only knew how to say please & thank you.) so that made for quite an adventure. I did have some fun shopping - although the aggressive salespeople at the markets were a little rough to deal with.

The pollution was pretty horrific. (You can see that in the olympic pictures below). It was thick enough that it looked like fog ... but it wasn't. I could smell it in my hair and in my clothes, and it was bad enough that it just felt hard to breathe after you'd been walking for a while. They certainly did quite a PR campaign at the olympics. I've heard that the sky really was as blue as it looked on TV - but that's only because they shut down the factories, forbade cars from driving in the city, and forced the sky to rain every night during the olympics. Amazing - the life in a communist country.

We made it to Tianenmen Square and the Forbidden City

And to the big olympic sites

But, the highlight was clearly the Great Wall. We rode a ski lift up to the wall, walked up & down along the wall for a bit, and then took a tobaggan down. It was awesome. In fact, the tobaggan was so awesome, that we went back up for another trip.