We ventured out a little yesterday (it's already after midnight, Friday, the 17th). We got up for the day, logged onto all of our email accounts and such. In doing so I fried our converter. It sparked up my arm, and smelled burnt. At first we did not know what appliance it was, our new portable dvd player, Tim's work laptop or mine. It blew all the power to our room. A hotel service lady came up and could not fix it then a maintenance guy came up and did fix it. Whew!
Finally we got out of our room and went to have breakfast, American breakfast. :) (sorry Eric we are not adventurous!) We went to talk with the tour company within the hotel to set up our tour for today. We are going to the Great Wall Badaling and the Ming Tombs. Tim loves to ask questions so we were probably there an hour. He made them laugh so much. He would ask questions and they would not understand and then they would all giggle behind the desk. We got a kick out of them laughing at us. Hee hee.
We walked around our hotel, went to the Silk Market, where we only bought some kids DVD's that we can play for Caleb that are in Chinese. Guiyou Department Store, walked down the main road for what seemed like forever just taking in all the sights and sounds. Again, traffic here is incredible. There is always traffic. It is 12:30am and the main road is just outside our room. The cars zooming by and honking is again, incredible. We cannot imagine what it was like here for the Olympics.
We came back to the hotel to put some goods in the room and then ventured down to the subway to go to Tienamen Square. It was an adventure. We were stared at a lot. The policeman the security people here wear the long dark green coats and fur hats. It is very formal and there are a lot of police on duty. We spent about 4 hours getting there walking around and talking to some Chinese people that knew English.
The first lady came up to us and knew we were looking at how to get back on the subway. She asked if she could help us. She knew a lot! We took it all in, but knew there was another motive. When we said we needed to get going she said that she volunteered at the Xi'an University with art students and she would like us to come and visit their gallery (just inside the Forbidden City gates). We did and loved the art! We knew we were going to get suckered into buying something though. We bought two scroll art pieces. The student that created them was there. If we were to believe what was being told to us, this was like a donation to the student to help them study abroad and make more out of an art career. I have to say we learned a lot in this conversation. We learned what some of their characters mean. We did not buy anymore but will be looking for a few items while in China because of this interesting adventure.
We finally got on our way and crossed the street (which means go under the street in a tunnel) and went to stand on Tienamen Square. I had learned and remembered about Tienaman Square and Chairman Mao from History in school. It was neat to just be standing there looking at his photo across the street.
We got back about 5 pm rested a little and then headed out to find food. We ate at the Pizza Hut in the hotel. Wow, that was an interesting menu. They have all sorts of Chinese cuisine on the menu. I felt like having pizza so that is what we got. I could not keep my eyes open so we headed back to the room and fell asleep, hence why I am awake now!
We will get up this morning and go downstairs to hop on a mini bus to go tour the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. We will be gone from 7:50am to 6:30pm for that, so I will not be posting. I may not be posting until we get to Xi'an.
We leave for the airport to Xi'an tomorrow at 10:15am. Our flight leaves at 12:30pm and arrives at 2:30pm. Okay, I am going back to bed. Here are some photos....
Shaanxi Time
