Insert Witty Blog Title Here: Beijing

To end the whirlwind Asia tour in December with our MN visitors, Ms. Tanya and Ms. Chandra went to Beijing for the weekend. (again, photo credits to Tanya as this post is a mix of both of our pics)

We arrived late afternoon on day 1 and checked into our super cute hotel and left to see some sights pronto. The clock was ticking on our less than 48 hours. We were within walking distance of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Due to past, ahem, incidents, of which you cannot speak when in China, the area around the square and the Forbidden City are heavily secured and you must go through airport style screening a few points along the way. But the walk was nice and the night view was pretty.

Tiananmen Square and Monument to the People's Heroes

This is the Tiananmen Tower Gate to the Forbidden City, which was closed already for the day, so we went on our last morning. I like this mama lion playing with her cub while fiercely keeping watch over Mao's picture.

Next was dinner-- while in the birthplace of Peking duck, you must eat Peking duck. The waitress demonstrated all the ways you use the different condiments, little buns and pancakes to make delicious little duck sandwiches and duck wraps. Crispy roasted duck skin dipped in sugar? Sounds gross, but so good.

Love this picture of the duck chefs carefully examining a fresh out of the fire duck.

Dessert was fun with a tiny caramel apple wrapped in cotton candy in a pot of fake grass, coconut pudding with dry ice flair.

After dinner we attempted to go to the Temple of Heaven, but took a left turn instead of a right turn coming out of the subway and ended up on a reeeeeeeally long scenic walk, finally admitted defeat and cabbed it back to the hotel.

Day 2 was the big day, my first Wonders of the World sighting! We arranged a private guide and driver to go outside Beijing for the first half of the day to the Mu Tian Yu section of the Great Wall of China. Our guide was a nice woman named Skye who was full of fun facts and good recommendations.

We took a chair lift up the hill, and here you can see the luge track that later we get to ride back down.

Love this pic that Skye took while riding the lift behind us.

We walked the length through several of the watchtowers, up and down slopes and ancient steps for about two hours.

There's something written in the hill with stones, but now I forget what.

Despite the drab foliage and pesky smog, the views were quite spectacular and it was pretty amazing to see the scale of the wall. Construction of the wall was no easy feat and so it is also known as the longest cemetery. If you were a prisoner sent to work on the wall who died before your sentence was up, your family had to send another member to complete the sentence. But never mind all the human suffering, time for selfies!

To guard the wall, you shoot your cannon through the bigger gap, and shoot arrows down through the smaller hole.

Time to bore you with more of my favorite pics.

While it might look like romantic fog, it's actually disgusting smog. I've said it once and I'll say it again, even if global warming is a hoax (which it's not), can't we all agree that pollution is gross and not fun to breathe in?

Skye offered up good photo tips for my phone after the battery went dead on my camera (poor planning on my part), but made for some pretty filtered photos.