National Day

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Hello everybody.

Well, the day is here, the day that's gotten in my way for basically the entire time we've been in Beijing. And it really got in the way today. Everything inside the second ring road is closed, so there's nothing cool open, all there is to do is sit at home and watch nuclear nukes drive by the Forbidden City on TV, followed by little girls dancing around with flowers, and then more soldiers...crazy. Well, I thought there was nothing to do, but there were a few places open around Longze and Huilongguan where we are staying, so Kate took us out to a market.

Again, I thought it would just be a boring market (I actually thought we were just going to grab something to cook with and I just wanted to get out of the house), so I didn't bring my camera, but it was great. and MASSIVE. There were 8 huge halls filled with everything from fruit and vegetables and meat to bedding and clothes and shoes. Not high quality stuff of course, but very cool. One of the halls was dedicated to pets, especially fish and turtles, so I had a bit of a look at them - including an 18" shark in one of the aquariums!

The coolest thing about the place though was the wholesale spices they had, just huge baskets that smelled incredible, and since it's not a place many westerners go to we were pretty popular! There was one group though that something pretty funny happened with. They kept on looking at us and then talking and laughing among themselves and I couldn't walk out what was going on. When we got closer to them Kate leaned in and said something and they all started looking very embarrassed and then started laughing - turns out they were saying that since we were foreigners, they should come and harrass us because we won't understand what they're saying. Kate just leaned in and said "I understand you", so they were suitably ashamed of themselves. We didn't get much from the markets, but it was a good day, I'm annoyed we didn't buy anything. After that we met up with some friends of Kate & Lloyd who'd been away for a little while and they showed us some photos of their holiday in Korea. That was pretty much it for the day, National Day is extremely annoying - don't ever be here on October 1 - especially not if it's 5 or 10 years from now!

That's all for today, hope everybody's well - Oh, hey Gaz, I'm sorry, but I got the time difference wrong, instead of us both being at 6:00, we were actually 4 hours apart - I'm sure you enjoyed your beer anyway!

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