Playing Tourist

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Today, Wedesday in China, we are playing tourist. Today we shopped until we dropped. We did sleep late - got up about 9:30am. Since we were up late, we missed breakfast. Finally had a great lunch on the street at around 2:00. Down one of the Hutong alleys. Had to GUMBA (bottoms up) some pee-joe to mark our last day in China. We have been going and spending all day!

We started with a trip to calligraphy alley. Megan want to get some scrolls for her nieces. We got some awesome piece from a Christian couple who's shop we had visited 3 weeks ago. Megan had one scroll personalized by adding a bike rider for a friend of hers. I had one made for me and found another framed piece for a friend. We also bargained made a good deal I think. Megan found two nice pieces for herself too. Then we headed to another part of town to find a better place for Megan to get her scrolls for her nieces made. In another part of town she had scrolls done in Chinese with Jasmin and Jade's names on them. More expensive but quite nice.

We got some Olympic t-shirts today. Great story with this one. We went into a t-shirt shop that I spotted that had some cool t-shirts in it. The shop was not much bigger than our closet. The shop owner spoke some English. When she realized we were Americans and saw the shirts we were looking at she said quietly that she had Olympic t-shirts and ushered us in the back room. You have to realize that any Olympic ANYTHING has to be sold from the Olympic store. CCTV Channel 9 (the only English speaking channel hear) had reported there were stiff penalties for any pirated Olympic memorabelia! We got our t-shirts for less than $10 each in the Olympic stores there are over $15.00. We also bargained for these. Megan thinks we could have gotten a better price, but I was happy. She made a sign slashing her neck when she sold them to us and put them in a bag and then inside my rice bag! FUN TIMES in China!

We also stood lined up along the street near the Forbidden City for over an hours with thousands of Chinese of Chinese. We heard the Olympic torch was passing thru there, so we thought we would wait and see. More policemen than I have every seen! There we 3 bus loads of police and one of soldiers. Not to mention all the vans of cops, the motorcycle cops, and the police cars! Oh yeah and we also had two large SWAT team cars go by. We can't be sure if it ever came by - if it did the large crowd - unlike Americans - was very quite. CCTV helicopter was also hovering over us for a good half hour or more. If it came by, we unfortunately did not see it. Even though we are tall there were so many people and we were at a distance, so it could have. Added some excitement to our day anyway!

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