Beijing

Forbidden city entrance
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Well, we have made it safely to Beijing!!  After lying in bed for hours (woke up at 1am - damm jet lag) until sunrise we walked over to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen square. The Forbidden city has to be one of the largest palaces in the world but that is something that we have noticed about China is that everything is big!  The buildings are absolutely massive - several city blocks long for one building.  The surface streets are about 10 lanes wide not including the two bike lanes.  And the driving - well for those of you that have been to Asia I don't need to say more but for those of you who have not - NIGHTMARE!!  There are basically no rules, no order, no seatbelts - seriously scary.

Forbidden City
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Today we went out to the Summer Palace - the Emperor surely couldn't be couped up in his 2,000 acre palace in the middle of the city but needed a retreat of about 200,000 acres about 30 km from the city.  Needless to say the Summer Palace is absolutely gorgeous and worth the trip out there.  We had taken a taxi out there and thought we would do the same on the way back in - back driving into Beijing is not the same as driving out of Beijing.  After realizing that we would be stuck in traffic for 2 hours and arguing with the taxi driver about the fair steeply rising every minute we sat in car we took an unexpected side tour of Beijing driving down one laned alleys head on into other trucks, bikes and people to be dumped off at the Subway station.  So after driving around for 1 hour in the taxi we ended up a few kilometers from where we started and quite a bit lighter in the pocketbook to end up at the subway station!! Which in no time had us back at our hotel.  I think is it something about our light hair and fair skin that yells foreigner!!

overlooking Tiananmen Square
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We met our group for the first time last night and everyone seems to be good so far - I will report back in a little while.