Goodbye Thailand, Hello China!

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This past week was my last week at school, making it my last week in Thailand. It was an incredibly easy week being my classes were working on projects or beginning new projects, so in the 4 days I was in school last week I only had to teach 2 lessons. It was a nice way to finish off the first half of my student teaching. Plus, Jason got here on Monday so it gave me stuff to do in the evenings besides being bored. Unfortunately, he was sick as soon as he got to Bangkok (see a trend yet?) but he was still able to get out and do some stuff and more importantly, we were both able to get our suits, which look simply amazing. We didn't do too much over the course of the week, but the one highlight in my mind is when we ate bugs. Or really only a bug. But still, we were wandering down a street with a bunch of vendors and one of them had some bugs so we tried one. We think it was a large ant larvae, but we're not entirely sure. Either way, it was a bug. It actually didn't taste too bad either. It had the consistency of a bean. But anyway, Saturday night we both left Bangkok and arrived in Beijing early Sunday morning. We got to our hostel, which besides being a little rustic, is actually quite nice and at a good location. The owner is extremely kind and has been helping us figure out where to go and eat and we've met some of the other people here and they all seem to be pretty nice.
Sunday when we got here we were both exhausted since we didn't get to sleep much on the plane, so we napped and then went on a free tour of the local hutong (neighborhood). It's actually really cool because it's a bunch of winding alleys that just seems to go on forever. Sunday night we went out for Peking duck and Jason may have hyped it up a bit, but it was still delicious. We ordered a whole duck, some rice, and some scallop appetizer and it was too much food, but it was all very good and we're planning on going back for some more duck tomorrow night. And the best part was that I got to eat duck brain.
Yesterday we slept in because we were still tired and then we walked over to the Forbidden City and went into the museum there. The place is enormous and it was pretty interesting just wandering around inside. We ended up spending much more time there than we had expected and when we got out we had wanted to go into Tienanmen Square since it's right across the street, but it was blocked off. We found out later that the National Congress is meeting this week and whenever they meet there are certain times during the day when the square is closed. I was disappointed I didn't get to see it yesterday but we're going to try again tomorrow. For dinner last night we went to a local restaurant where we were told we could get a typical Chinese meal and it was entirely different and much more delicious than Chinese food back home. I've never really been a huge fan of Chinese food, but I think if I were eating the real stuff I could eat it all the time because it is that good.
Today we had our tour of the Great Wall and it was... well, great. The tour we booked involved driving about 3 hours to a section of the wall built during the Ming Dynasty (400+ years old) and most of it had not been restored. When we got to the wall we had a 10km hike on the wall which was really cool. It took us about 4 hours and it was amazing to see how much effort must have gone into building it and it was also cool because there really wasn't anybody else there. Except for the locals trying to sell us stuff, who followed us for the first half of our trip. But besides being annoyed when we didn't buy anything, they were actually really nice. But I'm glad I saw the wall and I think it was cool to have seen the section we did instead of a more touristy area of the wall. Tonight we went out for some steamed dumplings for dinner and they were really good as well.
Tomorrow we're hoping to get into Tienanmen Square and hopefully see one or two other things that we were told we should see, but we'll see how the day goes. I'm keeping this short so I can shower and get some rest, so I'll let the photos finish what my words can't. I'll be home on Thursday, so I might have one more blog by this weekend, otherwise my last blog will probably come within the next week or two. See you all soon!

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Photos

Forbidden City
Looks great under all the scaffolding

The Great Wall
This was probably the nicest section we were on

The Wall
Most of what we hiked was like this