Well, I was a lazy bum today and slept in till around 9am...so we didn't make it to Mutianyu Great Wall. Cory ended up having to work in the morning as well, so it worked out that I didn't get up early. By the time we met up, it was lunch time and I had our day planned out while he was working.
He met me at my hotel and we walked to a nearby restaurant for lunch. Seriously, I don't know whether I just suck at picking out the foods (now that there is no one to help me pick stuff out), but the food I've been having lately is terrible. I thought I was going on the safe side by getting a spicy beef fried rice...pretty safe, right?!?! UGH! Remember the szechuan peppercorns I talked about in one of my previous blogs...this fried rice was full of the szechuan peppercorns, but you couldn't see them....they must have been in powder form or something. The minute I tasted it, I knew it was the peppercorn and my tongue started to get numb again. It was sooooo nasty I ate a few bites and couldn't eat anymore.
Our first stop for the day was Beihai Park. It's a 168-acre park filled with historic buildings, restaurants and a lake that is located in the center of Beijing. I'd read online that you can go boating on the lake....so when we got there, we rented a paddle boat. It was so nice and relaxing...just riding on the lake enjoying the scenery. I had Cory do most of the paddling since I had to do all the planning for our activities today. :) We spent about an hour on the lake and then walked around the rest of the park. The scenery is really beautiful (though probably better without the smog) and there were lots of people around...some are locals just playing cards and doing other activities. It was nice to see some greenery...which is something you don't see much of in Beijing!
We decided to walk to the Forbidden City next, but when asking directions on how to get there, the guy we asked told us that it closes at 5pm (it was 4:15pm when we asked him)...so it didn't make sense for us go there. He talked us into riding a rickshaw instead around the Hutong District. This was on my list of places that I wanted to go visit...so we decided to take the tour. Hutong means "alley" and there are thousands of hutongs in Beijing, but the number is shrinking. Here is a blurb I found online:
"The centre of Beijing is criss crossed with a grid of many hundreds of small lanes and alleyways. These are called hutongs and their layout dates originally from the Yuan dynasty in the 14th century. The number of hutongs in the city peaked in the 1950s at around 6000. Today, however, there are considerably less and more are disappearing each day because of the high premium on land and the rapid redevelopment of the city as it reinvents itself in time for the 2008 Olympics."
Though I think we paid too much for the tour, I thoroughly enjoyed it! Just riding on the rickshaw was alot of fun and it's something I probably wouldn't have done if I'd just gone and visited myself. The hutongs are really old and it looked like repairs were being done to some of the homes that are still there...it was definitely interesting to see a little bit of Beijing's history.
The hutongs are right by Houhai, which is the pub and bar district where the locals and tourists come for the nightlife. There is also lake in the center of everything...so the place was beautiful. The bars have outdoor couch seating and there were tourists everywhere walking around. The nightlife didn't really start yet since it was still early...so the bars were still pretty empty. We were going to eat dinner there, but the selection of bar food wasn't really good. We found a few chinese restaurants, but Cory was wanting something more American (since the food we'd had so far hasn't been all that great)...so after walking around for a bit, we decided to leave to find something closer to my hotel. Helen is coming in tomorrow and I was planning on taking her to Houhai anyways...so we figured we'd return the next day to enjoy the nightlife.
We went to the "Pizza Company" that is around the corner from my hotel...nothing spectacular...but better than lunch! :) Neither one of us ordered pizza though...I had some garlic bread with honey porked with baked with rice and Cory had BBQ ribs and pasta. I'm going to have to find better food tomorrow!!!
