We arrived to beijing and were shocked with how cold it is! We had done another over night flight and after our long day in the car and then the flight we were pretty exhausted. Our main goal was to try to order something to eat as all the menus were in Chinese characters with no English and no pictures. We ended up walking around our hotel until we could find a place that had a couple of pictures of noodle soups so we pointed at the pictures and that's what we got. Luckily there was no meat in either of the dishes as it truly would have been mystery meat. One thing we have noticed from the more touristy restaurants that do have English is they eat everything here. Turtle, frog, sea cucumber, sea horse, scorpion, cricket, intestines, brains, livers and hearts, they get their fill of protein!
Our next day we ventured out to see the lama temple, this is a complex with multiple buildings, one houses the Guinness book of world records largest carving from a single piece of sandlewood. It is a Buddha that is 26m high. We wandered down to the shopping area to buy me some warmer clothing. And headed to our wine and dine. This place we found online was awesome. It included 10 courses of Asian dishes and all the wine you could want. We were at quite a lively table so when the lady showed up with some Chinese shot (similar to vodka) the boys at the table over indulged... We finished the meal with black sesame ice cream and a banana fritter. One of the guys at our table was from Seattle who was in beijing for work. He said he might check out a Beatles cover band that was playing down the street and wanted to know if we'd be interested in joining. So we took the walk down our little alleyway and found 4 Brits with wigs playing away. It was a great night.
Unfortunately our great night turned out to be a terrible morning... We had booked a cooking class at the same place as the wine and dine and it started earlier in the morning. So after being out all night with unlimited wine and then beers at the Beatles we were not feeling so great packing our bags to head out. We were also changing hotels so we had to bring everything with us. The cooking class turned out to be really worth it. Although they do fry everything it was all very good. We went to check into our new hotel which was in a better part of town, and decided to figure out the best way to see the wall. After looking Online for all the different tours we decided to book with a group bus tour that would allow us to do the section we wanted but also wasn't a typical tour, no group lunches, no shopping stops it was perfect. So we had to make our way back to the older part of town that was close to our cooking class to book it. While in the area we noticed that everyone, literally everyone was walking around eating something, either small unknown dishes, meat on a stick, or a crepe type wrap. So of course we decided to join in! Geoff was thrilled when he found scorpions on a stick, so he had to try it. To me it looked disgusting, to him, it was delicious... We walked around the night market and found they put everything on a stick here and either fry or BBQ it, it was full of the craziest things we've ever seen. After touring around we eventually called it a night as we had an early morning bus ride to the wall to catch.
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