track our trek

so it turns out the first week in october is the biggest chinese national holiday of the year! we landed in beijing along with about 500,000 chinese tourists on holiday for the week! boy, we are lucking up with these national holidays, aren’t we? the upside is there are lots of festivals and special events going on…the down side is we shared tianamen square and the forbidden city with about 50,000 other people today! tianamen square is enormous. after more than 5 hours of walking and resting a bit to escape the crowds, and at least a dozen more pictures w/ more curious tourists, we turned back towards our hotel w/out even covering the whole of the forbidden city! it is sprawling, and quite magnificent. it’s really remarkable that so much of it remains intact and so well preserved. unlike some of the temples and palaces we’ve seen other places where only one or two buildings remain, the forbidden city remains a true city, and i could actually imagine people living there 400-500 years ago! we stupidly paid 260yaun apiece for a tour to the great wall tomorrow from our hostel without haggling & then discovered a couple places across the street selling the same tour for 90 and 130yuan! (the exchange rate’s about 8yuan to the dollar.) lesson learned! i’m sure the same 50,000 people from tianamen square will be on the wall with us tomorrow!
as we left the forbidden city, we met li and bing from wuhan. they introduced themselves to us as english students and asked if they could talk to us and practice their english. we walked for a while, and they suggested we go have some tea together…i was suspicious that they were part of some fishy scheme, but we went along with it. we “found” a tea house not far from our hostel and went through a whole tea tasting ceremony….there’s a tea festival this week, so we had a private room, with a server who served us 10 kinds of tea and told us the ingredients and history of each. it was really a lot of fun, and something we’d never have found on our own…of course afterwards we were invited to buy some tea, which we declined to do. the tasting itself cost almost $40US apiece!  we’re still not sure if li and bing had an angle, or if they really did just want to practice their english. they paid their part of the bill and bought tea to take home, so who knows…it was fun to meet them in any case.