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Published: June 16th 2010
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Houhai in Beijing
Rickshaw drivers hard at work We flew from Shenzhen to Beijing early yesterday morning. Upon arrival, Yoyo and Wonder's friend, Suzanna and her husband, picked us from the airport to take us to our hotel. They only spoke Mandarin so it was real test of our non-translational and body language reading skills. We had no idea what the hell was going on. We were turned away from the hotel that Binnson's relatives had originally made reservations for us at because ''we were foreigners''.... in other words - Binns would have got in just fine if he didn't have his white girlfriend along. Its funny how he is always treated as a local - I keep getting put into lines for foreigners and whatever English people know gets spoken to me, while Binnson is filed in with the regulars and gets spoken Mandarin too even if he tells people he doesn't know any. But he's Chinese... so he MUST know some!! Haha.
So after scrambling to find a new hotel that would allow foreigners to stay and dropping off our bags, our new hosts wanted to take us for food. They took us to get some peking duck.. yum.. Well Binns looked like he enjoyed it
- I had some other really good stuff, taro, deep fried pumpkin, potatoes, eggplant and some assorted greens.
After lunch they wanted to take us to the Olympic Park. It was really cool. We got lots of pictures of the bird's nest, the water cube, and random other Olympic stuff. While we were wandering around the Olympic Park, people were obviously staring at us. At first I thought it was in my head until Binnson pointed it out too. When we stopped at the bird's nest to take some pictures, a woman approached Binnson and asked him if she could take a picture of me. HA. Binns was confused because he thought she wanted him to take a picture of them as I was off taking pictures of my own while this was occurring. She then asked me if I would be in a picture with her kids as they wanted a picture of me because I was very beautiful. Hhahahaha... keep in mind it is friggen hot, I'm sweating like a pig, and after getting almost no sleep the night before our flight to Beijing. But I was a good sport and let them take a couple pictures...
whatever... But we didn't get the same reaction from everyone, someone stopped and laughed while a couple of other people took my picture without asking as well... kind of ridiculous... So it was an odd day - to start off getting turned away from a hotel to being paparazzied at the Olympic park.
They took us to another place called Houhai. It was this gorgeous little area that had a river that you could take a boat on, rooftop patios, old style streets that you could shop and take rickshaw's around. We had to laugh every time a rickshaw went by because there were always white people in them and never any of the Chinese, which obviously made me a prime candidate to take a rickshaw ride... however I passed it up for walking around the beautiful scenery. Yoyo's friend Suzanna, was always telling me to take pictures of stuff (well at least we think so... not too sure.. at first I thought she was saying my camera was a Houhai - until we got there... lol!) so I did and she seemed happy that we were happy. They took us to dinner after and then later drove us
back to our hotel. We were very grateful to have them as our hosts for the day and help us out with the hotel situation. Without their mandarin skills, we would probably still be trying to check in. However, we did feel bad that we couldn't really communicate how thankful we really were.
Today, we are on our own for the first time since getting to China... hopefully you hear from us again.
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