Rickshaw's at HouHai

Last week Shan Dian (Lightnin) and I took a short trip out to HouHai with a new friend (Noash) who was visiting from Brussels. We ate lunch at a Vietnamese resaurant named "Little Siagon", great food! As you can see by this first picture it was sunny, but extremely windy!

After lunch we took a quick tour of the Hutongs which is where we ran into the "Rickshaw Gauntlet". There were hundreds of these things and the drivers swarmed on our taxi like cockroaches trying to get us to come out and take a ride!

After seeing the frightned looks on the faces of the folks that decided to give them a try, we decided we were just fine in the taxi or on foot! ;-)

The Great Wall Revisited

About three weeks ago I got a visit from my director and he wanted to see some of the "real" China, not the standard tourist sites. So I thought it would be a good idea for us to visit The Wall.

We drove to JingShanLing and then climbed the wall to SiMaTai. This is the same 10K route that I took this past spring and it was nice to see how different it was at this time of year. It was also good to see it for a second time from a different perspective after living here for over 7 months.


The beginning of the trail (I think the banner says something to the effect of: "You are about to experience the ultimate "Stairmaster" workout!" ;-)

There are really no flat spots just a massive roller-coaster of stone




The view from here is breathtaking
This is the lake at the end of the trail

I will tell you that even though I had lost 15kg in body weight the wall was still every bit as difficult as it was the first time! We did however complete the route in nearly half the time that it took the first trip, 3hrs 20min compared to 6hrs!

Be Careful What You Ask For

Some of you have complained that you are tired of looking at the tree on that car. You know who you are! So here's a new blog minus photos...I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have wanted photos for this story!

Thunder and I just got back from the emergency room, and no it wasn't for me!!!! While Thunder was home a few weeks ago he had a cebascious cyst removed from his back. (Too much info so far?) Well he wasn't exactly the ideal patient. He was back on his motorcycle the very next day. So here we are three weeks later in Beijing and yep, he woke up this morning and knew he had to go to SOS the medical services for us here. No waiting lines, no forms to fill out and within an hour we had ten new stitches and were back on our way home! It was pretty interesting to have this new experience.

The other new thing that we tried was here in David's building. They have a complimentary breakfast that was really quite good. We had bacon, eggs, rice, some awesome pickles and peach juice. I added some sprite to this juice and David now thinks that a little rum was needed in it.

So I have to go take care of my patient now and trust me he is going to behave himself this time around! He will be working from home this week so that he doesn't have to carry his backpack and so we will have some extra time together. I'll let you know how that works for us later.