Advertisement
Published: April 4th 2010
Edit Blog Post
April 3, 2010
Well I finished my 16 miles. The day was so lovely and promising that I decided to walk outside. My plan was just to walk back and forth in front of my hotel (two blocks one direction and then two blocks the other direction), but I found a tiny little park with no traffic nearby. So I walked around and around this little park for four hours. The first two hours were great. It felt so good to be getting some serious exercise again. I was unable to get any of my regular walks for the week done since I’ve arrived here in Beijing. Also the first tiny flowers are starting to open on the branches of the bushes and trees here. I’m planning on taking some pictures each day to capture them slowly opening into full bloom. But back to my walk. . .by the third hour my legs were starting to cramp up (about mile 10). Cheri and I usually hit a ‘wall’ about this time during our long walks, but we push through it and we start to feel better again. However, I couldn’t seem to break through the ‘wall’ this time. It was probably because I hadn’t been sticking to my training schedule, (I should be able to do better this week now that I have a regular daily routine in place). By mile 12 I was dying. ..I could tell I had a huge blister on my little toe on my right foot. My right hip was acting up and I was starting to limp. Thankfully, Cheri and her wonderful husband Dave had loaded up my MP3 player with tons of high energy music. I just started focusing on songs and started singing along as I walked. Finally it was over. I hobbled back to the hotel and fell straight into bed for a well deserved nap.
One funny thing I noticed during my walk. . .first I should explain that Changping is about an hour north of Beijing and isn’t very touristy. ..so I’m the first Westerner that a lot of these people have ever seen. So people would ride by on their bikes (as I walked around and around the little park) and nearly fall over as they craned their necks to keep staring at me. I would smile and wave and they usually ended up smiling back. The little kids would just stop and stare with big round eyes and point at me. It was pretty amusing.
Later on the boys and girls from the lab (they worked all of Saturday), called and asked me to come meet them for lunch. I told them about the people staring at me and we all laughed. We also made plans for Sunday. We changed our schedule and we are going to go to the Forbidden City on Sunday and the Great Wall on Monday. Monday is a national holiday so everyone has the day off. I looked the Forbidden City up on Wikipedia and they go into a lot of detail about the history and the sights. If any of you are interested, I would encourage you to check it out. I promise to take tons and tons of pictures on both days.
A final note for the day and then I’ll be signing off. I was checking out the guide for my hotel to see what the gym hours were and noticed something very strange in the section labeled “Hotel Rules”. I took a picture of it. . .check out hotel rule number 3! (If you click on the picture they enlarge). Thankfully I forgot to bring radioactive articles when I was packing for my trip! Seriously, though. . .I wonder what happened to make the hotel have to a rule about carrying radioactive material into the hotel. Do people here really carry radioactive materials around with them when they travel? Interesting, huh? Alright. . .more later.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.149s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 8; qc: 52; dbt: 0.0567s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
anonymous
non-member comment
Wendy, you may be the only one read the rules. so glad you are enjoying yourself so far.