Seeing the Summer Palace (in winter)
The Great Wall visit has been delayed - too many
stairs on Thursday! We'll see that on
Saturday...
Today, Friday, we went to
the summer palace (complete with lunch - can you say squirrel?), saw Alex's
apartment, met with more Chinese engineers, ate Shichuan (szechuan) and I had
the rumored one-hour massage for $10 (hey, it was another day of
steps!)
So this will be lighter on photos, they take too
long to upload... there'll be more later, perhaps after the lines in Taiwan are
fully fixed.We didn't do the Great
Wall today - our companions, Alex and Blaine, were quite sore from all the steps
yesterday and Saturday, more of their chinese friends can join
us.So, introductions are in order -
we're traveling with two americans, Alex and Blaine. I know them though a
technical committee and open source project that we all participate in. Alex
lives in Philly, is nearly fluent in Mandarin, and has an apartment here in
Beijing. Blaine lives in Manila... yes, that Manila. Super nice people; albeit
camera shy.We're also spending a lot
of time with Chinese friends, Humphrey and Jian Hua. They both live in the
area, speak reasonable English (and Jian Hua speaks some Russian too - go
figure). They've been quite gracious and fun too... and also camera
shy.Okay, the
palace:
That's just a tiny portion - it cost
20 tons of silver to build this palace - way back when. For that, you get more
than one pavilion.
and so on... and of course, there's
lunch. So Alex did all the ordering, and said that "squirrel" was on the menu
and the order of the day. We were supposed to identify the dish that was the
squirrel.
Yes, it looks like a squirrel
tail? It's squirrelled fish... someone very talented made all those cuts
before frying...
But enough about
food...After a dinner of spicy
catfish, more duck, more fungi, more tofu, and generally just more of
everything, we went for massages (well, Alex and *I* did.) That was most
interesting, and was followed by tea.
A massage after 10,000 stairs.
$10A cup of tea after the massage. $20 (even
Starbucks could learn something
here.)Tomorrow is the Great Wall....
more stairs!!
Posted: Fri - January 5, 2007 at 04:57 PM