Day 1 - Beijing

The day began with a tour of the Forbidden City, the seat of government of Imperial China. The place is really big and currently undergoing renovation for preparation of the 2008 Olympic games. Some of the buildings were entirely under veil but we still saw more than enough. What I found most impressive about the place was the renovation being done. You can see from these pictures that they've repainted all the little details on the borders under the roof. This is a huge amount of work considering the number of buildings there are! Some of the beams had dozens of beautiful drawings on them and all building interiors were similarly decorated. The group of 4 in the last picture is Etienne, Myself, his uncle Serge, and his mommy.
On the road, we saw an amazingly sanitary display of many pounds of lettuce for sale, an old fletcher fortress, and an outdoor park where many cardiovascular machines could be found.
In the afternoon we went to the Temple of Heaven. It was slightly underwhelming as it uses a lot of the same architectural motifs as the Forbidden City but it is a very pictoresque area. Due to lightning the main temple had to be reconstructed a few times, perhaps this is why I noticed that the circular roofs dont form a perfect line but are a little wavy.
	Dinner was at this very odd underground place where we were served something I'll describe as a Mongolian meal. I loved it, but I think some people found it to be a bit weird. You'll notice our second sweet and sour fish in 2 days. What you can also see is the bridge that we use to rest our chopsticks on is attached to a spoon rest. This was probably one of the coolest things I saw in all of China! On this, the second day of our trip, I decided that I would get a set of those bridges and for the next THREE WEEKS I would scour every major city of this huge country only to come up completely empty handed! Every little shop I visited had dozens of different styles of chopstick bridges and 1 super expensive store had just the spoon holder, but no one had this thing. It's so fun, convenient, logical, and nice but yet no one has it? If anyone knows where I can find these, please, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, tell me!
After dinner, we went to a little presentation of Peking Opera where they played us 3 chapters from 3 different operas. The first one was interesting, the second hugely boring, the third was from Journey to the West and quite amazing. However, most people did not make it to the third one and were still fighting hard to sync up with China time. Too excited by the prospect of getting chopstick+spoon holders, I did not fall asleep. There was also a picture of Etienne sleeping; however, he deleted it. But fear not! There are more pictures of Etienne sleeping elsewhere.
	On our return to the hotel, we hit up the very Chinese institution of 7-11 where I purchased the loot shown. The chocolate and pineapple cookie were amazing, walnuts were left unfinished at the hotel, plum wine tasted very sweet and the yogourt was delicious and fun. You can drink out of a straw and it comes in lots of different flavours, like the Aloe I got. All that for about 15$CND. Etienne bought some other stuff also, including 2 bottles of beer for 50 cents each!
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