Beijing 7:04 pm (5:04 am Alberta)

It's been an interesting day. Breakfast was a buffet of both Chinese and Western foods, as well as stuff that was some weird (and not always successful) amalgam of both. Skip the so-called sausage is my suggestion. There were Danish, fruit, fried eggs, mini steam buns, all sorts of things. Just my kind of breakfast - a little bit of everything, rather than one big bowl of porridge to work through.

We got everyone down in the lobby and on the bus in good time. Today was the start of the one week National Holiday, so all the tourist places are chock full of not only foreign visitors, but all the folks in from the sticks. Everywhere we go, we are almost as interesting as the landmarks and people would be staring at us, pretending to be taking a picture of a building but really snapping pics of us... the little kids were fascinated and would follow us around. Mom in particular is a big hit - at the Summer Palace, one lady insisted on getting her picture taken with Mom! (According to Marco, Mom looks like a Hollywood star who is famous in China, but he can't remember the actress' name and we were all stumped.)

It's probably the lack of sleep, but I found a lot of what we saw today less impressive than I'd expected. The Summer Palace and the Winter Palace (or Forbidden City) are both huge, but awfully repetitive and you can't go in to most of the buildings, so it's just one exterior after another. And the buildings you do get to see inside of are usually quite short on furniture, so it's like looking at a really nicely painted warehouse. I do have to admit that I loved the garden at the Winter Palace - I guess that's more what I was hoping for; quiet, beautiful, serene. We kind of whipped through it and even with all the people, I could have hung out for a couple of hours.

Tian' Anmen square is just a big, flat paved space with buildings around it. In a sense, it's so big and it was so full of people that I think you don't get the true sense of it's scale. And it was unsurprisingly short of decorative tanks. However, because of the holiday, there was an abundance of police and military. The police service is national, so anywhere in the country they wear the same navy uniforms and they seemed a little more willing to interact with people. The military here are all boys between 18-20. It's a voluntary service and being young men with far too much testosterone, they take themselves pretty seriously. But they stand at attention really well!

Between Palaces, we stopped at a National shop for pearls. Mostly they sell cultivated fresh water pearls, although they also had some salt water pearl jewelery for sale. They had a big tank of oysters to demonstrate on and since no one else stepped up, I fished one out for the girl. It had enough small pearls in it for each lady in our group to be given one as a souvenir (I got the biggest for picking it out!) Then we went upstairs to let them try their darnedest to sell us goodies. The manager sent over a lovely necklace of black pearls for Mom, as she was the tour group leader. And the girl who'd given the demonstration attached herself to us to try and make a sale. Lucky for her, Mom was in a buying mood. She picked out a rope of pearls and crystals in purple and black colors and I found a silver lariat with two black pearls. They were marked at the same price, so you know who got the higher quality pearls! ;) As a tour, they offered us 20% off, but Mom got our necklaces two for one. I expect they still made a handsome profit, but we got three necklaces with pearls in the top of the mid-range for about $200. I think if we'd paid the price they'd been marked at, it would have been closer to $750.

We had lunch at the restaurant next door to the pearls and it was quite tasty. Lots of yummy Chinese food, with a plate of French fries tossed in for some reason. If nothing else, it made me laugh and the fries were actually pretty good. We never order in the restaurants, we just sit down and food starts appearing. I find the tour group frustrating in a lot of ways, they tend to zip passed what I want to linger at and spend forever in places I find completely boring; it's frustrating trying not to lose anyone, but there is a certain je ne sais quais in not having to think at all. :)

Dinner after the Forbidden City was Peking Duck. The restaurant had a giant roast duck on the roof, but unfortunately it was too dark to get a decent picture. For some reason, the meal started with a bunch of other dishes and then the duck came out. It was served with mu shu wrappers, sauce, julienned cucumbers and onions and diced garlic. The taste was absolutely fantastic. Marco told us how they raise the ducks specially to exercise and eat lots when they are young to develop big stomachs, then they are cooped up but still continue to eat a lot. This way, they develop about 1cm of subcutaneous fat, which is what makes them so moist and tasty when they are cooked. So it's not the nature, but the nurture which creates Peking duck. I don't really care, when the end product is smoky and sweet and melts on the tongue.

The only downer to the day is that I missed Stuart. I was right - I kept seeing things he'd like or wondering how he'd react to something or want to make a comment that only he would understand. Oh well - I'll just have to try and remember it all for when I get home!