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!
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