Of course you can't come to China and experience the culture without eating different food. Everyone knows that so many cultures revolve around a meal and being in China has been no different. I have to explain, however, that there are certain distinctions with Chinese food. We have had breakfast everyday in the hotel, which is a mix of Chinese food and American cuisine. You can have fresh fruit, cereal, danish, toast, omelets, eggs, bacon or ham if you want American traditional food. If you want to have Chinese food, you can have fried rice, spring rolls, dumplings, porridge, season (as they call it) vegetables, Chinese pancake with scallions, fried Strick (not sure what this is, but it’s like fried dough….pretty awesome). Fresh fruit is available including peaches, mandarin oranges, peaches, watermelon, dragon fruit, yellow watermelon ... read more

The plan for today was to begin at 8 a.m. and take a bus to the Summer Palace. After a wonderful breakfast of dumplings, fried rice, fried dough and fresh fruit, we boarded the bus for our journey to the summer palace. Again the weather here was very hot, hazy and humid. We have not seen the actual blue sky for several days because of the haze and pollution in the city. The temperature was 33C, which is upper 80s but with the humidity we still find it pretty unbearable. The ride to the Summer Palace took about one hour to the outskirts of the city. This is the summer home of the Emperor, who could take a boat by way of the moat around the Forbidden City to the river then to the lake. This ... read more

Today was another day of sightseeing that started out a little later than Saturday’s tour. We took a bus ride to the Forbidden City, also known as the Imperial Palace in the heart of Beijing. The palace was ordered to be built by Emperor Yongle (the same as the tomb we visited on Saturday) when he moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing. The palace has 9,999 rooms because it was believed that in the Temple of Heaven the emperors who had gone before had 10,000 so they wanted to be close to 10,000 for good luck but not exactly the same. Many of the buildings have a Chinese version of gargoyles on them, with animals to fight off the spirits. The higher the number the better luck you have, but they only do odd numbers ... read more

Today was 4th of July and of course being in China it didn't seem much like a holiday. But, it was a pretty awesome alternative to be able to journey to see the Great Wall of China. We took a bus from the city to the Badaling Gate of the Great Wall of China about 90 minutes outside the city. On the way to the Great Wall we stopped at the Jade Factory to take a tour and to have a shopping opportunity. It really seems like the prices listed are just for fun because if you work with the sales person you can haggle down. Some of the travel participants are better at it than others. I found a pair of earrings and I was able to get them for less than half off the ... read more

Lunch - more Chinese food, with white rice this time. Still no watermelon, thankfully. Be we have had room temperature water, beer and coke at every meal. Matthew had some beer.... lol...just kidding. We did have a cabbage dish with hot peppers. I told Matthew to avoid the hot peppers because they were really hot. Of course, that meant that he had to try them and found out that they were EXTREMELY hot....pretty funny watching him squirm. Cheryl (Pasteur - Old Cour days) got such a laugh out of it. 1 p.m. - After lunch Latest saga....so the "scanner" in the hotel scanned one of the participants and the red light/alarm went off. Immediately the hotel security came over to her and asked her to re-scan. She did it 2x more and still the light was ... read more