Day 1 in China

Because of the international date line and travel time I was all messed up with the dates so I just referred to them as Day _ in China. We woke up early because we weren't use to China time. The fun began even at breakfast. They told us to eat a lot at breakfast because lunch and dinner would be the same for 9 days. Supposedly the "western style" breakfast they serve at the hotel would be what we're use to. Try again. It was their version. Noodles, fried veggies, fried rice, and many more things I wouldn't try. Their french toast, rolls, and anything "western style" tasted of egg. They love eggs that's for sure. Their boiled eggs are cooked in soy sauce or some kind of dark liquid. This makes the eggs whites brown. Doesn't look very appetizing but Darryl said they weren't bad.

Enough about food for now. The first place we went to today was the Jade factory. To my surprise jade just isn't green. It was amazing some of the things they carved out of jade. Below you can see a couple of very detailed ships they have carved.

Next we went to the Ming tombs. It was so interesting to learn of the history with every place. The tiles this big emperor statue is sitting on are worth $2 million a piece. There were about 100 of them in the room we were in. We would have liked to snatch one. HA HA! If we would have tried I'm sure these guys would have seen to it that we were never heard from again. You can't see it in the picture but their right hand stays on their gun at all times. Just before lunch we went to the enamel factory. The detail and time that goes into making enamel pots is unbelievable. We then went upstairs to have lunch. I'll tell you what it was like and then I won't have to mention food for the rest of the trip because it was all the same. There is a big circle in the middle of the table that turns. There is a big bowl of rice and about 8 other dishes. The dishes are some sort of beef, pork, chicken, fish, tofu, and vegetable. Many were too bizarre for me, but we always found something we liked more than the rest and at that. Sometimes it was mainly the rice. They said that every day in China this is how they eat. They don't have as many choices but they don't have much variety in what they eat. When we told our guide about a typical week menu for us she was blown away.

We went to the Great Wall today too. WOW! I wanted to walk the whole entire wall but we didn't have enough time. We did get to walk a lot of it though. It's so amazing that they were able to engineer the things they did so long ago. The wall is just cool. I remember being fascinated with it when I was in elementary school so it was fun to be able to actually go there. The bottom picture is Darryl, me and Karen (Darryl's friend Brendan's wife) doing a little Charlies Angels pose. That night they took us to an entertainment building. These places are where the Chinese people go at night for fun. There are different floors that have different activities like massage, karaoke, dancing, etc. We went to an acrobat show. It was fun, but where we'd just seen Cirque Dreams we were a little disappointed.