And now my final China post. I’ll just list off all the other cool and interesting things we did or saw 🙂
Summer Palace. The Camp David of Beijing. The lake is man made and the grounds are beautiful. I could have spent longer here….especially if it had been warmer.
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tour company took us to 2 “stores.” We’re pretty sure that the stores help offset the cost of the tour, so we were more than willing to oblige and sit through a little presentation about jade and pearls. Jade’s not really my thing, so instead of looking for a bracelet or other trinket, we searched for the most expensive item in the store. Drum roll please…..
It’s a jade fountain! And it costs $361,904 at the current exchange rate. You could buy a house for that much! Which you’d need, if you wanted to display your jade fountain.
We also went to a pearl shop. Where they opened oysters to show us many pearls. Those pearl vendors in Hawaii are seriously ripping you off if you only get 1 pearl per oyster! Check out how many were in our Chinese oysters!
These are too small for jewelry (if they had waited longer to crack the oyster they would have been larger). Instead, they get ground up and made into fancy lotions and face creams to help keep you young!
We also got to visit the Bird’s Nest and the Watercube, home of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Nick is holding up a #1. We were often reminded that the US had the most medals but China had the most golds. We were also told that China’s soccer team is laughable.
This was a sign in the olympic village area.
Most of the food we ate in China was really good. We found a nice back alley where they serve “street meat.” I was recovering from an upset tummy, so I opted not to try anything. But Nick was game.
See those scorpions on the left? They were still moving. I’m pretty sure that once you order the scorpion stick, they deep fry it and kill the scorpions. But we weren’t brave enough to give it a try. Nick has no idea what kind of meat he was eating, but he said it was good and it cost about $0.30.
More bugs!
And last but not least. The toilets (mild amounts of potty humor, you’ve been warned)! Our welcome packet informed us that the “toilets in China are nasty.” Great. They are setting the bar very low. They also said you should bring your own TP and hand sanitizer. Oh dear. This was coupled with all of our friends telling us that China toilets are dirty and often don’t even have doors.
Thankfully, the tour company did a great job pointing us to “4 star” toilets. 4 stars means that the restroom maintains a certain level of cleanliness and also has at least 1 wester toilet. What kind of toilets do typical Chinese people use? Squat toilets.
This was a nice squat toilet in the airport. It’s a nice hole in the ground. I’ve been camping and hiking and have had to do my share of squatting. But do you want to know the worst part about squatting here? All the layers of clothes! In order to successfully squat, your pants need to be around your ankles. Totally fine if you’re wearing a pair of jeans, but 2 pairs of long underwear + jeans = tough! Luckily, I only had to use it once.
And did I mention the toilet paper situation? Good thing we packed our own. All in all, I was mentally prepared for NASTY and I got, “not too bad.” I think there were grosser restrooms at the rest stops between SF and Seattle!
Our tour company was ChinaSpree and the whole thing cost less than a round trip ticket to China. It sounds like they do these deals every year, so check in the September-ish time frame. It’s totally worth it. Super fun. Awesome tour guide, fun people and we got to see some amazing stuff. Where to next??