Back in Beijing

The benefits of a guide clearly explained
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So we're back in the big city (Nanchang "only" has 4 million people!). We flew back yesterday afternoon, and things went pretty ok, all things considered. The flight out of Nanchang was over an hour late, and so we waited at the gate for quite a while. Everyone knows how boring waiting for a plane can be... Now imagine you're just 1 year old. We expected the worst. Luckily, the kids turned out to be very well behaved. There was very few meltdowns at the airport, and just a tiny bit of crying on the airplane (during take off and landing). The flight back to Canada should go fine, especially considering that the babies will have another week of bonding with the new parents under their belt.

Big panda
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We got to the hotel around 10:30, then we had to wait for over an hour to get our luggage delivered to our room. After that everyone just fell asleep exhausted (you try to hold a baby in your arms for 7 hours straight and not be completely exhausted!). It turns out we needed lots of sleep to face the adventures of another day. Today, we went to the Silk market, the Beijing Zoo, and to another interesting restaurant for supper.

The Silk market was in one word nuts. A bunch of stalls on every floor, with red-coated hawkers calling out at everyone walking by, especially loudly to the white folks: "Hey sir, you buy jeans. You buy jeans NOW!" Everything is done by haggling, meaning there are no prices on anything. You have no idea of how good a deal you're getting unless you go in knowing in advance exactly how much you want to pay, and even then making an offer always results in "But sir, you are crazy. I am so hungry, I can't sell for that." etc. etc. The sales girls will literally grab you by the wrist with both hands and drag you into their store. One grabbed Chuck with both hands and only let him go after he dragged himself backwards and said fairly loudly "Let me go. Let me go, now!" So neither of us bought anything (though the selection of knock-offs is terrific) but we're told going in right when they open on a weekday is a better option - they are much less aggressive then. We'll see. We've learned "Boo yow" means "Go away, and I mean right now!" and it worked in getting rid of some beggars on our way back to the hotel.

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We decided to check out the zoo in the afternoon to see the pandas as it may be our only chance to see them, ever. The cab ride over was typically scary - in Beijing as in all of China if there are any road rules, they are not enforced. Nobody bothers much with turn signals and the bigger the vehicle, the "righter" is its right-of-way. At any rate we got their unscathed.

Tickets were first up. Chuck pushed and shoved his way into the scrum in front of the ticket office (no such thing as personal space nor are there any orderly line-ups for anything). The idea was to shove your hand with money in it at the ticket-seller, and to get your hand in there ahead of the next guy. Chuck managed to push his way in fairly quickly, probably because he was way bigger than everyone else (remember the traffic rules).

Momma giraffe
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Three pandas were home. The first was outside on a tree, and looked pretty sad. He was more brown and black than white, looking as if he had rolled around in the dust to cool off. He huffed and puffed in the tree, apparently trying to somehow avoid over-heating. Inside were three more, one out like a light but another was pushing up against the glass. Great photo-op but you have to wonder how much spirit they can possibly have left, being cooped up inside what's essentially a prison, on display for countless mob masses day after day (ourselves included).

On the plus side, the habitats for some of the other animals were a little more humane. We got to see giraffes, zebras, lots and lots of birds as well as monkeys. We took some photos as well as footage of it all.

The taxi ride back to the hotel was as white-knuckled at the previous one. But we're getting the hang of the traffic rules around here, and we even found ourselves yelling at another driver (clearly unexperienced) who was having trouble merging into another lane, and as a result was causing a slow down in traffic. "You have room to merge now!", "This is your chance!" - we were yelling to the other vehicle whenever a vehicle-sized gap came up in the other lane. Everyone else seems to  be able to merge into a spot that seems smaller than their car!

After all that adventure, we were ready for supper. Together with another member of our travel group, we ventured out of the hotel in search of some kind of restaurant. We ended up finding a place not even a block from here, specializing in "bland and boring" northern chinese cuisine (their words, not ours). Not sure if we would call the many variation of animal genitals "bland and boring (there was many of those on the menu), but we managed to find a few dishes that were both exotic enough to spark our interest, and ordinary enough that we were actually able to eat it all.

Now it's time to go to bed, since we're getting up early tomorrow, in order to get to the Great Wall before the weather gets too overwhelmingly hot.

Tata for now!