Pack your own toilet paper and DON'T DRINK THE WATER.....we're going to China!

We are almost half way through our Korea adventure...can you believe it? Ughhh I am sooooo behind on our blogs. Also we realized ..."Holy Smokes..we need to get some traveling under our belt".

First stop: BEIJING!!!

Thank God for the Olympics because I have a feeling that the city of Beijing is 100% improved because of the event.
We got the full benefit of a cleaned up city with beautiful architecture and somewhat clean air! We really think Beijing is an awesome place to visit. In fact we found China to be so much preferable to South Korea....(but more about that in a later blog.)

All the research I did prepared us for the fact that bathrooms in China were going to be hard to find and most likely NOT up to western standards. Also, one must carry their own roll of TP. This is a luxury that Americans take for granted...public restrooms nearly everywhere you go and free toilet paper. I LOVE AMERICA!!!!!

Of course I had to use the bathroom as soon as our plane landed and here is a picture of the bathroom in the Beijing Airport. Besides the "normal" toilet in our western style hotel, this was the nicest bathroom we encountered during our vacation.

I was super glad that I had TP with me. Fortunately for you this is the only bathroom picture I will show on the blog.
I want to keep this blog rated PG and I don't want to gross anyone out....(but I will be describing our bathroom adventures in detail later...so be forewarned.)

After a long "rip off" taxi ride from the airport to our hotel...(Taxi's will be a whole other blog). We settled into our hotel and decided to explore the city straight away.

Even Andy, the "Human Map", (also fodder for another blog) needed a little help to get us going in the right direction.

EVERYWHERE were remnants of the games. Let me just say that a whole lot of money was spent on this Olympics. Beijing 2008 posters, banners, paintings, advertisements, sculptures are literally on every street you walk.

Another thing we noticed were the number of bicyclists around. It is great! One of the measures that China took to help alleviate their horrid pollution problem was to take 800,000 cars off the street everyday before the Olympics. We were told that there are 3 million cars in Beijing alone. Since this measure had such a noticeable impact on the air quality they decided to put this into effect again. YAY! In fact they stared this on the Monday that we arrived. The pollution was really bad and both of us could feel it in our eyes, nose and throat. By Wednesday the air was almost clear! WOW! Only in a Communist country can you tell 1/3 of drivers that they cannot drive on particular days. That's one star for communism. The ONLY star they are getting from me! (Commies VS. Capitalist swine is also another blog we have lined up).
We walked in the direction of where we thought Tianamen Square might be. It was supposedly a 15 minute walk from our hotel. We are walking along and everything is going fine when the street we are on goes into an old neighborhood of Beijing. I am really excited because I care more about this China than I do about all the touristy rubbish. But Andy gets all "sketched" out. He's like, "It's not smart to go down dark alley ways in the dark..." and I'm all like, "Yeah! but this is probably the ONLY neighborhood that Beijing didn't demolish for the Olympics and I want to see it!" But of course Hubby won this round, but he did let me take this picture of him. He is almost bigger than the shop.

So we walk around in circles for two hours when we wind up back where we started. By this time the charm of walking is starting to wear off. We see a guy on a rickety bike rickshaw type deal and he wants to give us a ride. We agree on a price of 2. My throbbing feet were grateful and we settled in for a quaint bike ride. Well guess what? We end up riding down the street that Andy didn't want to go in the first place. Yeah, it was sketchy...but it was the right way! This guy starts pedaling and I kinda feel sorry for him because Andy is kind of a big dude. But I decide to settle in for the ride and enjoy the scenery. About 90 seconds into the ride our driver took this photo of us.

Ahhhh! Look at the happy couple...and yes we are NOT in focus....thanks for nothing buddy!

Driver gets back on and pedals for another 8 or 10 minutes and stops. What?!?! We are there already??? After walking around for two hours??....it was just down that sketchy street that Andy thought was so "dangerous"?
So we get off the bike and Andy gets out his wallet to pay the man with 2 Yuan. The driver gets all upset and pulls out his cell phone and shows Andy that he wants 200 Yuan. Well folks, 200 yuan is about $30 U.S. dollars. Andy said,"NO Way" you only went 2 blocks. And driver made all kinds of gestures about how laborious it was to cycle us even that far. Andy only had big bills in his wallet and gave the man 100 yuan. The man was "acting" all upset but really let's think about it for a minute. Do you know anyone that makes $15 for 10 minutes of work? We were cheated for the second time that day. But the good thing about us Pences is that we learn very quickly and getting this nonsense out of the way the first day proved beneficial for the rest of the trip.

I'll stop here for now...but just know that I have about 15 posts in "draft" mode.
So STAY TUNED!