The world through our eyes: China Jan 7-16

From 90 degree weather to 16 degrees is the change we made from Bangkok to Beijing and we did not handle the cold very well. On the news it stated that the days where were there they experienced record highs for the pollution count in the air. We felt it every day as we were walking around. While in China we visited the great wall, summer palace, the Forbidden City , the temple of heaven and the zoo. One of my favorite memories was at the zoo, there was this little girl all dressed in pink and when she got to the panda enclosure she freaked out. Screaming “ panda panda panda” it was like her whole life was changing in this one moment. She was mesmerized by these magnificent bears.

We spent the rest of our days haggling at the local markets. Adam spent 30 minutes one day being yelled at by a women who desperately wanted him to buy her bag and she must have had some pent up aggression from some other circumstances during the day. Everywhere we go we say we are from Canada as we did just move from there. After may talks with local shop keepers we found that in China they do not really like Americans. They say that Americans are hard bargainers and want everything for so cheap. They may now think that about Canadians as we were on a mission to pick up a few things for the Orphanage we were going to visit and wanted a good deal. It was interesting though to hear them talk of Americans in that way. Little did they know that I was an American.

The only air pollution free day we had was during our visit to the great wall. Outside of the city we could see the sun shining. We took a chair lift to the top and then tobogganed down the mountain after hiking the wall for a while. We concluded the day by visiting the summer palace in the middle of winter. From the pictures below you can see that it wasn’t the greatest idea in the freezing cold.