Day Three- Part One- Hutong Tour

We woke up EARLY again despite being so tired the night before and taking sleeping pills… thank you jet lag… :)

We didn’t have to meet our guide quite as early, so we hung out around our room for a bit, skyped with the kids (where we found out Braden had been sick and running a fever since the day before :(  and made arrangements for Me Me to pick him up so she could take care of him. He ended up running a fever and being sick for several days and missed 4 days of school, poor guy!!)

When it was late enough, we got dressed and went down to the restaurant to have some yummy breakfast. The breakfast buffets were really the food highlight of our whole trip, for sure! It was included in the price of the room and there was so much yummy food everywhere to be eaten!

We headed back up to our room to finish packing up because we were leaving the hotel for good today to head to our girls’ provinces! What an exciting day! I woke up with MAJOR butterflies in my tummy. The very short “vacation” part of this trip was nearing its end and the REAL reason for our trip was beginning.

After checking out of our hotel and loading up in the van, our first stop was the Hutong Tour. This tour took us through what  you might call the historic area of Beijing. This area is protected by the government and is being preserved. So much of Beijing has become high rises to be able to accommodate more people in less space, but this area is especially neat because it’s the same as it has been for hundreds of years!

Here we are on the rickshaw with our driver looking on.

We took lots of pictures as we rode along. Here you can see all the rickshaws lined up waiting for customers. This was only 1 street lined with them. There were at least 6 more long streets lined with them! There were so many rickshaws and drivers in this area!

One of the many hundreds of alley ways in the Hutong district.

As we rode along there was a beautiful lake with shopping and restaurants all alongside.

Here’s a row of restaurants and bars along one side. We were told by our guide that this is a trendy spot at night and on the weekends.

Here is our guide, Victor, telling us about the Hutong District. One cool fact about this lake is that it connects to the lake at the Summer Palace!

Looking across the lake towards the city high rises.

Construction was going on here. It had been completely gutted.

Walking along through some of the alleyways.

This Hutong had been renovated in recent years.

The highlight of our Hutong tour and perhaps of Beijing (for me) was getting to go inside a family’s home. This was just as we walked inside the front door and turned to our right. You can see the front door with windows on the left of the photo.

We even got to sit on the couches and visit with the sweet homeowner! This house has been in her husband’s family for 300 years!

On the other side of the living room area, was their back porch area.

Also across the living room, and to the left of the back porch, was another little room which was the kitchen. This is it! The lady in the red shirt is the homeowner’s sister who was there for their traditional Sunday dinner. They spend all day preparing the meal to enjoy in the evening.

Right across from the kitchen was the one and only bedroom.

The other room in the home was the homeowner’s studio. We found out that he was a national award winning artist! Wow! His original work was amazingly beautiful. One of the main items on our must buy list was original artwork. As I looked at his work in his studio I was SO wishing we could buy some of his paintings!

As we were looking around and taking pictures, the homeowner (artist) came in for a brief minute to say hi. He had been hanging out at the neighbor’s house. I got the feeling that he didn’t love the attention and showing people his home because after saying Hi briefly, he went back to the neighbor’s house :)

Here is his medal he won for being the National Artist of the Year. It was in a glass front bookcase in his studio.

As we finished looking around, the homeowner pulled out a box full of artwork for us to look at. And they let us buy some!! We were so excited! We knew we wanted to buy artwork, but to get to buy the artwork from an artist that we got to meet and see his home… it was just incredible! It took us a little while to look through all of them, decide how many we would buy and then pick out the ones we wanted. They were all so very beautiful!

Here we are with the homeowner. She was a very kind lady who warmly welcomed us into her home that she was obviously very proud of. Her husband had lived his whole life in  this exact home and she moved here with him when they were married. They have one daughter whom they raised in this home. She is now married and living in a high rise in the city, but she does come back to visit often.

After we left the family’s Hutong, we walked back to where our rickshaws were parked to ride back to where we started. We saw lots of neat sights along the way back.

Here we are posing with our guide at the end of our tour. He did a great job and we all enjoyed this tour very much!

Day Two- Part 5

After we left the Summer Palace, we made the 45-ish minute drive back into town. Rachel LOVES tea and had requested for our guide to take us to a tea house. Our amazing Rocky was happy to oblige! He took us to his favorite tea house.

We walked through these doors and up the stairs to go into the tea house.

Here’s the table we sat at.

Our server was a very sweet guy. I thought his accent was so cute. You could tell that he had learned his English from a person from England because he had a British accent to it- mixed in with the Chinese accent. It was very unique and I thought it was a little funny too.

This was a flowering tea. It was so gorgeous when the flowers were all open.

I have to admit—I don’t love hot teas. I love me some sweet tea—yes! I do! But… all the different exotic, non sweet, hot teas… that’s another story. BUT… I wanted to embrace the whole experience. Jason was on the same page as me too. So we sat down around the table across from the server. He would brew it up and tell us about it and then pour us a little glass of the tea. The first one, he told us needed to be drank in one big gulp. So I did it! Oh, my, it wasn’t pleasing to my palate, but it wasn’t super disgusting… so I thought, I can do this! Then when the second one came around, we were supposed to sip it. Oh man… I managed about 3 small sips and I just couldn’t do it anymore! I had to pour my entire cup into the other small cup for the “leftovers”. By the time the 3rd one came around, Rachel and Scott were on the side of the table where they were served first and they were oooing and awwing over this one. I was so excited to try it! I took a big gulp and I kid you not I thought I was going to spit it out everywhere! I swear it tasted like flowery scented hand lotion! ICKKKKKYYYYY!!! I couldn’t believe they could actually love that tea so much. My little cup for the “leftovers” was already full, so I reached over and poured it into Scott’s empty “leftover” cup with a grin :) I didn’t like any of the rest of them to tell you the truth—but I did try them all. Jason did even better than I did, but by the time we were done, his “leftovers” cup was pretty much full too. :) It really was a neat experience and we knew how much Scott and especially Rachel enjoyed it, so we were glad to be there.

After we left the tea house, our driver took us straight to the Acrobat show that we had purchased tickets for. We were so incredibly tired by this time. We had all been up since about 3 or 4 am with the jet lag, we had been going NON-STOP ALL DAY and it was about 8pm when the show started.

We were hungry and tired, so after we found our seats, we went right to the snack stand! We got popcorn, which was just bags of microwave popcorn, and I also got some of my favorite Chinese candies. I forgot the name and I didn’t get a picture, but they are little mushroom shaped cookies. The stem is shortbread and the mushroom on top is milk chocolate. I can gobble down a box in no time! I also got a cold can of coke! yummy!! Jason was able to get a bottle of Mtn. Dew! Just like everything else that is “American” it had a different taste and is made from different ingredients.

We were starting to fade after we got our bellies full so we were anxious for the show to start.

It was difficult to get pictures from our seats with no flash with the lens we had on the camera this day, but we did get a few. The colors on the stage were really beautiful.

These are our little buddies. They introduced themselves to us before the show started and talked our ears off during the intermission. They were 3rd graders- all friends from the same school and were all there with their parents for a weekend outing. They were not shy at all and wanted to practice their English. We were SUPER impressed by their English! What was really cute and cool was when we asked them something they couldn’t understand or we couldn’t understand something they said, one little girl whipped out her ipod and typed it into a translate app then showed us the screen! Gotta love technology! AND SUPER smart and sweet kids! They were the highlight of the show for us!

Before intermission, I was really struggling to stay awake. It’s not that the show wasn’t good… but rather, that I was just so tired and it was warm and my belly was full of snacks. I finally gave in and let my eyes close. We were all struggling, but Scott and I seemed to feel it the worst at this part of the evening. At intermission, he went out to the snack stand and got us each a Red Bull! I decided that since I wanted to go to sleep as soon as we got back to the hotel, that I better not drink it, so Jason drank it instead :)

After the show was over around 9:30 pm, Rocky picked us up and took us a little bit down the road to a McDonald’s for a quick bite to eat. This was our first time to a Chinese McDonald’s, so we were actually excited about it! The menu was TOTALLY different than an American McDonald’s menu. I’m kicking myself for not taking a picture now, but I didn’t have my camera on me at the time. Since I had eaten so many snacks at the theater, I just got a small order of fries and a coke. The coke had ICE! Heaven! And the fries were delish, just not as salty as here at home.

That, my friends, is FINALLY the END of DAY Two—our first full day in Beijing. It was sure a doozy! But we wouldn’t have had it any other way! We wanted to make the MOST out of our small amount of time in the city and looking back on all that we accomplished in this one day, we can truly say that we made the most of it.

We had a blast and experienced so many once in a lifetime opportunities together. It was an amazing day!

As soon as our driver dropped us off at our hotel, we went straight to our room. Jason and I each took the world’s fastest showers, took a sleeping pill so hopefully we could get a full night’s sleep and went straight to bed. I don’t actually even remember my head hitting the pillow because I was so tired!

Day Two- Part 4

After lunch, we headed back outside of town to go to the Summer Palace. First impression… WOW! There are A LOT of people here!!! Seriously—it was like wall to wall people. And like everywhere else in China… so many people were smoking. I was a little overwhelmed at first because of the number of people and the smell of the smoke- which I’m very sensitive too. I decided to keep an open mind and it really did get better. Once we got past the first few stops, it seemed to open up a bit and everyone was allowed to spread out a little bit more.

We couldn’t go into any of the buildings, but we were able to walk around outside and look at everything. I like this picture of one of these buildings with the uniformed guard walking by.

As I mentioned previously, we attracted quite a bit of attention everywhere we went. People would stop and stare at us. Some non-chalantly, and some just out right staring and not trying to hide it! Here was one part of the day where we weren’t attracting the most stares… a group of monks walked right by us. Everyone stopped what they were doing to stare. Including us, I must admit. It’s not everyday we see a sight like this! It was a really cool thing to experience.

Beautiful temple in the distance.

Boats lined up and overlooking the man made lake. I can’t remember or recall everything we learned about the Summer Palace this day… but you really should look up some of the history about it online. It’s really, really fascinating!!!

So. Many. People.

This was a LONG hallway. It went on FOREVER! All of the paintings were hand painted and each one was different from the others. There were many thousands. It was beautiful.

Close up of one of the paintings.

In between each of the hallways, there was a separate room with more paintings which adjoined the next hallway. Here’s the ceiling in one of the little rooms.

Looking down the next hallway. They were all open air.

Overlooking the water across to the bridge.

Gorgeous temple.

Overlooking the Princess Dowager’s boat.

Boats on the other side of the big Princess’ boat.

Some more gorgeous sights on the way to the exit. The whole property was just breathtakingly beautiful.

I am so glad we got to experience the Summer Palace. You just can’t imagine how sprawling, how beautiful and how incredibly over the top it was to have a property like this just for the Princess Dowager and her family to vacation. It was just beautiful!