October 26 LAMA TEMPLE

LAMA TEMPLE
Originally uploaded by mc10672

Day 2 Beijing. We were both wide awake at 5am and headed downstairs to breakfast to a delicious breakfast. We met many more of our fellow travelers, most of whom were headed out to a tour today. We went to buy water, then headed down the street to a Mall.. Anyway, we found some good places to eat,looked around a bit, found the local CVS type store, then we headed to the Lama Temple via cab. Lucky for all you, Flickr (which I'm using to access blogger and upload pics) takes forever to upload photos otherwise I would have inflicted upon you all 39 of the photos I took today. It is an amazing complex of Temples and you have to walk down a street lined with nothing but incense shops. You can smell the incense from the temple complex about 1/2 mile away. It was amazing. You were not allowed to take pictures of the Buddhas inside the temple complex, just outside. One was about 3 stories tall. Many tourists from all over China there offering incense. and Each temple indicated what each Buddha was for--longevity, health, etc. One group of tourists were Tibetans, in full local costume. Their clothes were amazing. I tried to take some photos very descreetly, but not sure if they will get uploaded. Tonight we went over to the Thai restuarant to eat. There is a big event going on the hotel, as it is connected to a concert Hall and they've transformed the place downstairs. They even set up some metal detectors, set up a red carpet, TV crews are here--I guess its part of the Beijing music festival sponsored by Audi...but the rest is in Chinese.

Quick Notes: The most important thing is we get our kid on Sunday, so we are motivated to get this international travel thing down somewhat now before the hard part begins.
TV: David is really enjoying the 3 Stooges in Chinese. For TV, we get CNN from the UK, ESPN and 1 HBO channel.
Fashion: We are in the Business district and everyone here is quite fashionable. Great shoes & scarves. We look very grubby and every day has been a bad hair day (for me).
Tipping: As you know, David loves to tip. Today in the taxis and restuarants outside the hotel, everyone looked at us as if we were losing our mind and there was alot of confusion. So we did learn that Tipping is generally just not done unless you are at a Western-style hotel.
Language: Most everyone knows a little bit of English and seem to really appreciate our lame attempts to say a few words.
Best thing we've packed so far: Laptop.
Weather: Cooler today, and hazy. Still haven't broken out my jacket yet.


Tomorrow, we go to the Great Wall on a tour. Sorry about the typos - a little difficult to post. It's still in Chinese. The China time on the blog is wrong I think, It is 4:05 pm here now and it is showing 1:04 am at home. More later