October 22

Man, where do I start today? Today was an extremely busy day of sightseeing. We started out by sharpening our haggling skills at the "Dirt Market." The Dirt Market is basically a massive sized flea market. You can find anything from posters of Chairman Mao, jewelry, knock offs of expensive watches, souveniers, or even "day-old" antiquities as our guide, Bing would call them. The biggest thing to remember is to haggle, for three reasons: The first would be because the Chinese vendors expect it and even get insulted if you don't. The second is because the vendors see Americans and ask for way more than the object is worth. And...the third is if the price is too high for you, there is several other vendors that may have the same thing and want to sell it worse than the first vendor would. Also, it's just plain fun even if you don't normally like to shop.

From there we went to explore the Temple of Heaven. The Temple of Heaven was a really beautiful Buddhist Temple. From there, we went to eat lunch at wonderful, local noodle restaurant. We sampled everything from fried eggplant to sizzling beef.

After lunch, we were off to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Man, between the two of these places there was quite a bit of walking. The overwhelming hugeness of these two places was incredible. Tiananmen Square still had a few decorations up from a recent holiday and there was a miltary ceremony commemorating the passing of the torch for the Asian Games going on as well. With all of the tourists that were there, Karen and Christine compared it to Epcott Center in Florida.

The Forbidden City was also quite large with several steps to walk and some very ornate temples that were used for past emperors. While we were there, Bing told of us of an emperor that had 3000 concubines and that at one point, it had over 9,000 rooms.

After touring the Forbidden City, we went to a local tea shop and learned some of the etiquette for properly making and drinking tea, then went to dinner at a very beautiful restaurant.

After dinner we went and watched an acrobatic show that was too incredible to put into words. Unfortunately, we were unable to take pictures at this show. Because some of the things that these kids did were beyond words. Then we returned to the hotel and went our separate ways for the night.