First Full Day in Beijing

Today was an interesting day! Started with the breakfast buffet, which was very nice, although for some reason the Chinese do not know that Dr Pepper is a breakfast drink. The food on the buffet was a mixture of normal American items like sausage links, bacon and omletes, but there was also fried rice, steamed biscuits and sushi.

After breakfast, we ganged up with the other families that we have met so far, Lee and Grace, Robert and Michelle, Karyn, Robert and Debbie and we walked to the store, well a store to get some snacks and water and Coke. The store was quite crowded and of course, no one here speaks English(imagine that), so paying for our items was fun. Lee and Jubal tried some home cooking they were cooking at the store with an egg and some crunchy stuff, with some hot sauce. Interesting, but won't be doing that again.

Afterwards, we all made a taxi trip to the Lama Temple. The buildings were interesting and the people that came, other than tourists, burnt incense, lots of them and prayed to budda, which if we understood correctly, there are a lot of budda's. Hopefully we will be able to post the pictures we have taken, which would include the ones taken here, soon. We are still experiencing some difficulties with the internet here.

There are thousands of bicycles here. Seems to be the primary mode of transportation. There are bicycle lanes, but the bicycles cross in the intersections with the cars. There are hardly any stop lights, so the bicycles wait for the cars and the pedestrians wait for both. We spent some time in taxi's today and although the driving here is aggressive, there doesn't seem to be any anger in the drivers. We saw people passing on the shoulder, we were cut off several times and cut several other drivers off and almost ran over a bicyclist, but they just look at each other and keep going. The bus drivers drive the same way, but they usually are given the room they need when they cut you off.

We had Thai today at Jimmy's. The food was very good and the service was excellent, which other than the taxi drivers, has been the norm. The places and streets we've been on have been extremely clean. The air is foggy here or at least that's what we're calling it. After dinner, we walked to the mall which was about a mile or so. The stores were small, but very nice and if we needed anything, between the grocery store and the stores in the mall, we would have been able to get it. We saw an attempted bicycle theft also. Some of the bicycles have locks built/welded on the frames. The woman trying to steel the bicycle had several keys she was using, but a few tries, she just walked away.

We also met Marie and David, Dave is a native Oklahoman and Danielle and Michael. Very nice folks.

We are still trying to post pictures. It could happen...we will keep trying.

More later, God Bless