Obsessions of Asia

We are woefully behind on posting since we came back to the United States. Despite having almost constant access to computers and the Internet, we have focused our time on seeing family and friends. Even for me, it is hard to say, "Mom, I know you haven't seen me for two years, but I just have to get those Obsessions posts done..."

So, without anymore excuses, here come Asia's obsessions:

India- Spitting. An easy one. The average Indian might spit 1200 times per day. And we aren't talking about small little bits of spittle. We're talking about pieces of lung the size of a fist. Sure, lots of Indians also have a paan habit (think chewing tobacco, but different ingredients that also happen to make one's spit Kool-Aid red), but even those that don't chew still spit. And before the spitting comes a noise that sounds like the regurgitation of a cow. Wait, most Indians don't eat cow, so a goat. Like hawking up a goat.

Sri Lanka- Water tanks. What is a water tank you ask? Well, I'm going to tell you even if you didn't ask. A water tank is a man made lake. Sri Lanka has a lot of areas that are at altitude and are very wet for part of the year, but very dry for the rest of the year. So, starting a thousand years ago or more, digging giant water pits became the prerequisite for growing any large city that wasn't on the sea. And they did it with gusto. Some of the cities have dozens of lakes that are far larger than many dammed lakes in the US, and they were all dug out by hand. Or maybe with hands and a rock and maybe a chisel, but you get the point. Good job, ancient Sri Lankans!

Malaysia- Tourism posters. If all the Asian countries were elementary school students, Malaysia would get the "Tries Hardest" certificate at the end of the year. Not only are tourism posters in nearly every window of Malaysia, they are in nearly every hotel and vaguely related travel business everywhere in Asia. They must have printed millions of them. And that makes it even sadder that more people don't visit Malaysia, which really is a spectacular country.

Singapore- Rules. Singapore has rules for everything. And fines for not following most of them. The list of fines in the subway cars was as long as my arm. (We especially appreciated that one of the highest fines was for bringing the smelly durian fruit on the train.) If you like to conform, consider moving to Singapore. If you have ever voted Libertarian or are a card carrying member of the Tea Party, consider vacationing somewhere other than Singapore.

Indonesia- Cats without tails. Didn't see that one coming, did you? We saw hundreds of cats in Indonesia and every one of them had some or all of its tail missing. We can only assume that people think they should not have tails and take it upon themselves to cut off the tails with whatever sharp instrument is laying around when they see a cat with tail intact. We thought that we might see this in other countries, but it was really just Indonesia.

Thailand- 7-Eleven. Think of all the 7-Elevens you have ever seen. Multiply that number by 100. That is how many 7-Elevens are on the average block in Thailand. It used to be a joke in New York that Starbucks would often have locations right across the street from one another. 7-Eleven in Thailand might regularly have three stores on a block. I don't understand how they stay in business, especially since they are more expensive than most Thai businesses, but they all seem the thrive. Since I love Slurpees, I thank the Thai people for making cheap Slurpees available everywhere.

Burma (Myanmar)- Gold leaf. I had never heard of someone's job being to hammer gold until it was gold leaf. In Burma, that ranks as one of the most popular jobs. Where does all that gold leaf go? Buddhists in Burma buy the gold leaf and then rub it onto the Buddha statues (or anything else that they believe should be gold) at the Buddhist temples. This keeps everything bright and shiny. Oh, I should point out that only men are allowed to do this. Women aren't allowed to touch the Buddha statues, but can buy some gold leaf and have a manly man rub it onto the Buddha.

Cambodia- Angkor Wat. It seems sort of lame to be obsessed with your biggest tourist attraction, but Cambodia unquestionably is. It adorns the flag, half the stores in the country are named for it, and it inspired enough awe that even Pol Pot didn't destroy it. And Pol Pot destroyed just about everything in Cambodia.

Vietnam- Motor scooters. The average person in Vietnam has 3.2 motor scooters. Approximately. Through a quantum trick, they ride all of them simultaneously. So, while Vietnam has only 80 million people, 250 million people ply the roads on motor scooters at any given time. And most of those 250 million are going down the road that you want to cross. The streets of the large cities look like a moped convention.

Laos- Fruit shakes. I try to find something deeper than a food for country obsessions, but fruit shakes made with fruit, condensed milk, sugar, and ice are what hold the country of Laos together and makes the whole country so friendly. That's pure speculation, but locals and tourists alike can be found drinking delicious and cheap shakes all over the country, and we were certainly fans. For those who are not feeling happy enough after a regular shake, many places seem to offer "happy" shakes, which come with whatever drugs they happen to have in stock (pot in most places).

China- Crotchless pants. No, China isn't turning into 1980s New York. Any child under the age of three in China wears pants with a giant slit down the crotch and no underwear underneath. This allows them to go to the bathroom anytime and anywhere they like. And I do mean anytime and anywhere. Let's say the kid is waiting in a busy ticket line inside the train station with the parent and needs to go to the bathroom--that's what those pants are for. Number one or number two? Doesn't matter. Does the parent clean it up? No. It stays there for others to step in. While China seems likely to take over the world one day, we hope they get rid of crotchless pants prior to that.

Mongolia- Chengis Khan. Yeah, I thought it was Genghis Khan, too, but not in Mongolia. This founder of the Mongol Empire is known for uniting the nomads of Mongolia, declaring war on anything that moved, killing about a bajillion people, and creating the beginning of the largest empire the world has ever known. That, of course, makes him the hero of Mongolia. Based on our experience, I don't see the second coming of the Mongol Empire anytime soon.

There you have it: the obsessions of Asia. Disagree with us? Too bad. Write your own blog. Or leave us nasty comments about how we disparaged your country. That's why our home address isn't on the blog. Well, that and we don't have a home yet...

From Rupees to Rupiah: Financing Asia

All through our travels, people told us how cheap Asia would be...and, looking forward to bringing down our average daily budget, we hoped that they were right. Luckily, they were!

Here are the numbers by country. In case you forgot how we do this, these numbers are for two people, including visa costs and all costs on the ground (and in the air if we took internal flights). Sometimes we also include the cost of a flight into the country if that was the only way to get there.

India: $53 per day. Visas cost $74 each at the embassy in Istanbul. India is one of the cheapest countries we've been to, so staying there for five weeks did wonders for our financial (if not gastrointestinal) health. Hotel rooms ranged from $10-$25 depending on level of comfort (except in Mumbai, where it's hard to find a double for less than $50); restaurant meals could usually be had for a buck or two, and street food for pennies; and train transport in sleeper class cost less than a hotel. Not getting ripped off on cabs and tourist excursions required some negotiating.

Sri Lanka: $80 per day (including flight from Chennai, India, which costs about $120 per ticket; $53 per day without flight). No visa fees. Sri Lanka's hotels and food were a little more expensive than India's, but it made up for it with what is possibly the world's cheapest public transport on a $-per-hour basis. If you plan to visit more than two historic sites in the "Cultural Triangle" area, getting a pass can save you $25 or more.

Malaysia: $47 per day. No visas. Some travelers complain about Malaysia being pricey, but as it turns out, the only traveler item that is really expensive in (Muslim-majority) Malaysia is beer! As long as you don't drink much, the country is terrific value, especially considering how developed it is. Air-con double rooms with shared (but very clean, hot-water) bathrooms cost $10-$15, and delicious, cheap street food abounds. Transport is a little pricier than some Asian countries, but you usually get comfortable, AC buses on smooth roads. We stuck to the peninsula this time and didn't do any fancy tourist excursions, but our memories of our previous trip to Borneo are that prices were very reasonable there, too.

Singapore: $111 per day. No visas. We only spent two days in Singapore, so this is kind of skewed, but it's certainly one of the most developed and expensive countries in Southeast Asia. Most of the cheaper hotels are in the red light district, where we found a decent private room for $35 a night. Public transport, museums, and restaurants are comparable to Western prices, but taxis (which are metered, hallelujah!) and street or food court foods are relatively cheap.

Indonesia: $102 per day. One-month visas on arrival at the airport cost $25 each. Indonesia was surprisingly expensive, though that's largely because we did a lot of pricey activities like SCUBA diving, chartering a boat to Krakatau volcano, and a few other organized tours. No-frills internal flights between the islands were a pretty good deal, usually less than $50 one-way and could be booked just a day or two before. Buses and trains on the ground varied a lot in price and quality. Hotel rooms for $10-$15 could be found, but were usually pretty disgusting; if we wanted cleanliness and AC, we usually had to pay at least $25. Cheap street food could be found in most places, though not so much in touristy Bali, where we usually had to shell out for real restaurants.

Thailand: $83 per day. No visa fees. Considering how many touristy activities we did in Thailand (diving, elephant training camp, etc.), this is a great average. Hotel and transport standards are pretty high, but competition for the tourist buck keeps prices low. Markets selling cheap local food are pretty easy to find, and even fancy restaurants are probably cheaper than the Thai restaurants you find at home. Just try not to get robbed, which could certainly send your costs soaring!

Myanmar: $77 per day. Visas cost $27 each in Bangkok. This average includes flights into and out of Yangon from Bangkok ($130 each roundtrip), which accounted for one-third of our expenditures there. Once you're on the ground, Myanmar (Burma) is super cheap in all categories, though its rough roads, ancient vehicles, and power cuts often made it feel more like traveling in sub-Saharan Africa than Southeast Asia.

Cambodia: $53 per day. Visas cost $20 each at the border. Cambodia is excellent value. $11 a night got us rooms with bathroom, AC, and sat TV in both Siem Riep and Phnom Penn, the two most touristed cities in the country. Markets and restaurants offer cheap food; bus transport and tourist site admissions are pretty reasonable. If we had stayed longer, or ventured out to less touristy places, it probably would have been even cheaper, but even so, Cambodia was one of the cheapest destinations on our trip.

Vietnam: $66 per day. Visas cost $45 each in Phnom Penn, Cambodia. Vietnam's one of those countries that feels more expensive than it is, probably because people are trying to rip you off almost continuously. But we did manage to stay in some pretty nice hotel rooms and eat decent food for not a lot of money. Trains cost more than buses but are much nicer (which isn't the same as saying that they're actually nice!), especially for overnight travel. Halong Bay overnight cruises can be an especially good deal for a decently swanky experience...provided your boat doesn't sink in the night, of course.

Laos: $57 per day. Visas cost $40 each at the border. Laos is pretty poor, so the roads and buses aren't always the nicest, but hotels were quite comfortable, food was inexpensive, activities like kayaking were very reasonable, and prices overall about as cheap as could be.

China: $92 per day. Visas cost $160 each in Vientiane, Laos--the most expensive of our entire trip. (They are about $100 less expensive for non-Americans, though.) Yunnan province, in southwestern China, was incredibly inexpensive; with $10 hotel rooms and cheap bus rides, it cost no more than Laos, where we had just come from. As we moved east and to the bigger cities, things got more expensive, though you could always find cheap and tasty food, even in Beijing. In general, China didn't feel overpriced considering the good quality of rooms, trains, and food that we got, and some tourist attractions, like the Forbidden City, were surprisingly reasonable.

Mongolia: $121 per day. No visas needed for Americans, though most nationalities need one. This number is high because we spent 6 of our 8 days in the country on a private jeep tour of the Gobi. If we'd managed to find a couple of other travelers to share the tour with, costs would have been halved. Otherwise, the country's pretty budget-friendly: In Ulaan Bataar, the capital, a hostel room with breakfast, Internet, and shared bath cost $15; there were expensive restaurants and cheap local-food canteens to choose from; and the 15-hour train from the China border cost around $9 for seats, or $25 for sleeper berths.

So, Asia had a few expensive countries, but was mostly pretty cheap for us. Hope that this post was slightly helpful to you if you're planning to backpack through Asia. If you have any questions, leave a comment and we'll do our best to get back to you!

Food of China

Food in the rest of China continued to impress us. Writing about what we ate will make me hungry, but I'll give it a try.

As most New Yorkers know from Joe's Shanghai in Chinatown, Shanghai has "soup dumplings"--dumplings that are filled with meat and broth. What Joe's Shanghai didn't teach us is that they also come in a fried variety. We ordered 20 of them for dinner one night and the cashier thought that she was missing something in the language barrier. We assured her that I would eat that many, though.
What's that fried bread have in it? Don't know, but we'll try one. Oh, something green! That's good.
In China, Lay's come in blueberry. Much better than they sound. We bought them several times. Furthermore, I liked that in the ingredients, they list "Breezy Blueberry Flavoring," as though that tells me everything I could ever want to know about the content of the chips.
Happy Lemon is a drink chain in China that sells bubble teas and the like. Some of their combinations (like the ones with "rock cheese") were terrible. Some were almost potable. Tara and Brooke liked most of them.
Soup abounds in China. This one seems to have some pork, some tofu, and some green stuff. Oh, and some tasty glass noodles. Looks good.
Ever wonder what Chinese people eat for breakfast? If they were staying in our hotel, they ate this. Lacking in sugar, but not bad. Some steamed bread, some fried bread, some wonton soup, some rice porridge (with do flavor), and some pickled beets. Oh, and a hard-boiled egg.
Tara and Brooke taste the bean filled cakes that we bought on the street. We saw a long line at a little food stall, so, in true Communist fashion, we got in it. Luckily, the man in front of us spoke some English and told us that some had red beans and some had soy beans. Red bean was better.
At the Uigher restaurant, we got this sesame beef that tasted a fair bit like roast beef. Fortunately, Brooke spent half the dinner dancing on stage, so Tara and I were able to eat much of it.
Do I look like a pirate in this picture of lamb kababs? No. Was I trying to? Yes. Instead, let's pretend that I poked myself in the eye while eating meat straight off the skewer in a very manly fashion.
More wonderful noodles. Almost all the noodles that we ordered in China were different, and all were excellent. These were the longest noodles that I have ever seen. I slurped one for five minutes straight. Just like a cartoon. Come to think of it, I normally look like a cartoon when eating.
In Chengdu, we asked our hotel for an authentic Sichuan hotpot experience. They delivered. The place was with locals, many of the men without shirts and some of the tables with an extra seat for their dogs. Tara looks scared in this picture because she is. We ordered vegetables, duck tongue, pork belly, some kind of beef, and shrimp. But it is the hot pot itself that is a killer. Sichuan spice combines a hot pepper with a numbing pepper. This creates a really strange sensation in your mouth that is similar to eating Oragel. None of our intestines thanked us for it. Oh, and duck tongue has very little meat or taste, sadly.
Here is the actual hotpot. The boiling stuff in the middle is duck broth. No spice. The outside ring is filled with oil and crazy Sichuan spice. The whole thing is heated to about six thousand degrees Celsius to cook your food (and your eyelashes, if you aren't careful).
Where Chinese people are hiking, there are cucumber sellers. Not my idea of a wonderful treat, but Brooke enjoyed this one in an entirely non-suggestive manner. Right, like you can even hold a giant cucumber in a non-suggestive manner.
At the Panda Reserve, they let you try the special bread that they feed to the pandas for extra nutrition (since their normal bamboo diet provides them with just about nothing). This bread tastes like burnt grass with bran added, but Tara really liked it. She ate several.
This is what Americans would call kungpao chicken. It tastes a lot different in China, but I can see the resemblence. It does have the crazy spice that numbs, though, which made Tara believe that she was having a stroke or some other equally bad problem.
Fresh chrysanthemum tea has some flowers and berries floating in the top with some sugar in the bottom. Add hot water and you have something that people pay a lot of money for. So, run outside now, grab a flower, and add sugar and hot water. You will save yourself the money.
This dish was made of mushrooms and was amazing. That's all we can tell you. The menu was entirely in Chinese and we pointed to this one randomly.
My jasmine green tea would have been excellent had I been able to steal the sugar from Tara's chrysantemum tea. Chinese people don't drink sugar in green tea, though, so they had no understanding of my problem. I suggest carrying a lot of sugar with you in China.
On the streets of Xian, Tara found a woman selling fresh noodles with some cucumber and sauce on top. She thought they were the best noodles that she had ever had. After a couple of helpings, we almost had to pay a taxi to take us back the next day, but her fear of missing our flight was just slightly greater than her desire to eat more of these.
Next to the noodle vendor was a man selling these. What are those? I ate one, but am not qualified to say. I think pork, but I think parts of the pig that I don't want to know about are somehow involved.
Anything that looks like a popsicle is hard for me to pass up. This one turned out to be a somewhat sweet rice concoction molded around a chopstick. And maybe with some beans. I couldn't really tell.
Tara liked her flower and hot water mix so much that she tried to buy some bottled chrysanthemum tea at the store. We failed this time and ended up with jasmine, but we eventually figured out which flower picture was the right one.
In the Xian Muslim district, they sell this soup that is noodles, mutton, broth, and bits of a very dense bread that is almost like dumplings. I thought it would be gross, but it was actually very good. Especially since it was cold and a bit rainy. We also tried "Ice Peak", which turned out to be an orange Fanta knock-off.
The streets of the Muslim quarter reminded us of the Middle East at night. Date and dried fruit sellers everywhere.
Tara found this sesame bread that tasted very much like the simit of Turkey (or like a sesame bagel if you are American, which is probably more likely than you being Turkish and knowing what simit tastes like).
We saw some expensive tea for sale, but we opted for the really cheap juice that everyone had for sale. This was probably a mistake. We'll call it water with mixed-fruit syrup.
This reminded us of the sweet, bean-filled pastries of Shanghai, so we bought one. It was a bit sweet, but not very good.
Xian is famous for its peanut butter candy. And rightfully so. It is pounded into many thin layers and breaks in your mouth like a wonderful peanut butter phylo dough.
We broke down the next day (with some peer pressure from Brooke to just spend the 75 cents for a drink that might not taste like urine) and bought the fruity tea for sale everywhere in Xian. It was a bit fruity and a bit tea-y, but probably not worth the money.
This is donkey. That's right--donkey. The texture was like beef tongue. The taste was like...well...ass. Hahahahaha! Sure, you probably saw that coming, but it's still funny. It was actually not bad. Tara loved it enough to look for it on other menus, though we never found it.
These sweets looked almost Indian, and tasted like soft pretzels soaked in sugar water. They were better than that description makes them sound.
These noodles were the size of sheets. I could have used one noodle to cover my bed for sleeping.
Almond juice tastes like marzipan, which I loathe. Tara, however, loves marzipan and likes this drink. I think Chinese people drink it only in hopes that they can replace the girl on the front as the lightest-skinned Chinese person on earth.
When frantically searching for dinner one night, we ducked into a tiny restaurant in an alley and ended up with an amazing feast. Pictured are dumplings, sausage, really interesting glass noodles, shredded and fried potatoes, and a bitter melon omelet. Tara and I hate omelets, but Brooke loved it.
Fresh yogurt. Yum. Just kidding. Fresh yogurt is just as bad as packaged yogurt, but at least you can return the clay packaging, which they probably then just throw out instead of reusing.
Our fanciest dinner of China was to a Peking duck restaurant.
This was as hard as a rock, but at least it was sweet. I only broke a couple of my teeth eating it. No one else seemed interested in having some.
Back to the duck meal! After we paid a crazy amount for the duck, the restaurant was kind enough to throw in this snazzy fruit plate for free. My favorite part was the steaming dry ice. It didn't taste as good as the fruit, though.
And what was the best part of the duck? The brain! I was the only one willing to try it. It tasted like mush. Mushed mush. No other discernible taste.
China has Dairy Queen! A lot of Dairy Queens, as it turns out. They are expensive, but we still went to a lot of them. Hooray for Blizzards!
China has even more strange packaged meat products than Dairy Queens. This one was a pork product. I ate most of it, but can't tell you any more information than that. Oh, and it was slightly spicy.
What goes well with two Snickers? A battery, of course! This two pack with an extra battery was cheaper than just buying two Snickers. Who was I to resist this marketing gimmick? I bought two.
From the restaurant that brought us the donkey comes this pork belly. It was pretty good, but looks less appetizing than any pork belly that I had ever eaten.
And last of all is the food that we bought right at the Mongolian border in northern China. The food there is not quite Mongolian, but not quite normal Chinese. We had some rice noodles with unknown meat, unknown yellow vegetable, and cucumbers. It was very good. Then, off to Mongolia.
The food of China was amazing diverse. Almost all of it was good enough that we would happily eat it again (except for maybe the hotpot). Tara has already started a mental list of foods to eat the next time that she visits China. Had we known what food would be like in the countries to come, we would have tried to cart freeze dried dumplings out of China with us.

Clay Soldiers, Stone Walls: Xi'an and Beijing

From Chengdu, we headed north to Xi'an, which doesn't look so far away on the map but still takes 18 hours by train to reach. Brooke's cold was getting worse, so when we reached our hostel, she took a rest while Andy and I headed out to see the monuments and meet the locals.
The symbol of Xi'an is the Big Goose Pagoda. It doesn't really look like a goose to me, but it certainly was big. Unfortunately, they also charge a big admission fee, so we just admired it from the outside.
Xi'an, like some other Chinese cities, has a drum tower and a bell tower. The bells used to be rung in the morning to wake everyone up, while the drums were beaten at sunset to tell everyone to go to bed. Both are illuminated at night these days and are very attractive (here's the drum tower).

The next day, we all headed about an hour out of town to see Xi'an's top attraction, the Terracotta Army. Known as one of the greatest archaeological finds in the world, it consists of thousands of 2,000-year-old terra cotta soldiers and horses, all built to guard an emperor's mausoleum. They were buried with the emperor, and only discovered again in 1974.

The soldiers have amazing detail. Here's a kneeling archer. His wooden weapon has long since rotted away, but you can still admire his elaborately scultped clothes, hairdo, facial expression, etc.
The details just get more amazing the closer you look at the figures.
Of course, not every soldier is in perfect condition. A lot have lost their heads over the years, probably thanks to invaders who desecrated the tomb.
A few horse-drawn carriages are in impressively good shape, though. These even have a bit of their original paint still visible.
There are three main excavation pits you can visit. All are still actively being dug through by archaologists, so you can see the unrestored state in which they find some of the statues.
We saved Pit 1, the biggest pit, for last. It's the size of an airplane hangar and is filled with regiments of soldiers. This is just a small area from that pit.
Back in Xi'an city, we had enough time to explore the famous Muslim Quarter. The real highlight was the delicious food specialties that the local Hui Muslims make, but we also visited the mosque, which impressively combined Chinese- and Arabian-style architecture. Though the Chinese style really is dominant.

The mosque's minaret, or call-to-prayer tower, had this sign outside of it. It took us all several readings to realize that it's trying to say "Retrospection Tower," not "Retard Inspection Tower."

Our last stop in China was many people's first destination--the capital, Beijing! We spent four days there and could easily have spent several more, as there is so much to see there. I was kind of expecting a dirty, traffic-choked, tourist-cluttered megalopolis, but was quite pleasantly surprised to instead find a city with many trees and parks and old neighborhoods called Hutongs, which were full of tiny, winding streets, traditional homes, and more bicycles than cars.

Our first major activity was going to an acrobatics show, where young acrobats blew us and a large auditorium full of (mostly Chinese) tourists away with their tricks. Andy got a few shots in of the tightrope girl and the contortionists before an usher noticed and pointed to the large no cameras sign...

A street in Beijing near our hostel, decked out with lanterns for the dining crowds.
The next day, it was off to visit Tianamen Square--apparently the world's largest public square--and the Forbidden City. First we popped by Mao's mausoleum on the square, thereby completing Andy's trifecta of pickled communist leaders viewed (he's seen Lenin, Ho Chi Min, and now Mao). No cameras allowed inside, but here's the mausoleum from the square.
Mao's likeness graces the entrance to the Forbidden City. Here Andy and I add our likenesses to sweeten the image.
The Forbidden City was constructed in the 1400s by the Ming Dynasty and housed the Chinese royal families and their attendants for centuries. Commoners were not allowed, but now for less than $10 a person, anyone can go in. It was really crowded when we visited, so we kind of wished that maybe they'd decided to forbid just a few more people...

Anyway, you proceed through a series of impressive gates, like this one. Many are heavily restored to have that slick, built-yesterday that so many historical sites in China sport these days...
You can get an audioguide in an impressive number of languages. I searched in vain for Pig-Latin, but apparently the only fake, made-up language you can get is Esperanto.
Many structures in the Forbidden City have little animals on the roofs to protect them. The more animals, the more important the building.
A Tara, a building, and a huge friggin' crowd.
Nice cauldron! These held water to help put out fires--necessary, since all the buildings are made of wood. Ironically, when the water froze in the winter, attendants had to light a fire each day to thaw it...and hope that fire didn't spread to the buildings and necessitate the water's use!
When a dragon and a turtle mate, this is what you get.
The City has a fun museum of fancy clocks from Europe and China from the 18th and 19th centuries. The best one has this animatronic figure who writes calligraphy using real ink and parchment at specified times.
This sign is such a lie. The toilets at the Forbidden City were your standard dirty, paperless squats. Don't be fooled!
The next day, it was off to the Great Wall of China. We skipped the more touristy and restored sections and went straight to Jinshanling, which is farther from Beijing, more in its original state, and set in beautiful countryside. Construction in this part began in the 1300s (though some parts of the wall are older than that). We highly recommend visiting this section of the wall, which was one of the highlights of China for all of us.
We shared a car to the wall and explored it with Virginie and Pierre-Louis, a fantastic couple from France. How often do you get to learn dirty French cabaret songs while hiking along a beautiful ancient monument?
We have so many pictures of the wall, but we'll wrap it up with this one. The weather was a bit overcast, but that made our hike cooler and made the surroundings more atmospheric. I didn't know that the terrain the wall was built on was so hilly--it was quite a workout just to hike along it, so I can see now how, combined with the natural landscape, it helped keep invaders at bay.
On our way back into the city, we stopped for photos at the Bird's Nest stadium, built for the 2008 Olympics. I bet it looks even neater when it gets illuminated at night.
Our hostel was located right next to the Lama Temple, the most important Tibetan Buddhist temple outside of Tibet. It has some nice dog/dragon statues...
And a few awesome blue demons. Nice skull hat! I'm still not clear on the role of these demons in Buddhism, though...
Here is my namesake, the bodhavista Tara! She is enlightened, but stays on earth to help other people reach Nirvana. You know, just like I do.
The highlight of this temple is the 18-meter (60-foot) Buddha, carved out of a single piece of sandalwood. Add it to the list of enormous Buddhas that we've paid to see in Asia.
While Brooke bravely rented a bike and explored the Hutongs, Andy and I went to the not-so-impressive Beijing Natural History Museum. Though you can't say it was a total bust, because he got to climb inside a big plastic uterus. Yes, that's what you think it is swimming towards him along the floor.
Near that museum is the Temple of Heaven, a nifty round Taoist Temple from the 1400s, set in a lovely park.
That was our last major stop in Beijing. That night, Brooke headed back to Shanghai to catch her flight home, and the next morning, Andy and I flew to the Mongolian border to cross and continue our Asian adventures in that country.

Before we came to China, I was so concerned about the language barrier, the food, the crowds, and the pollution, but I have to say that it was one of the most pleasantly surprising countries we have been to on this long trip. Amazing eats, good public transportation, friendlier people than I'd ever expected, lots of English signage, and so many interesting and beautiful sights to see. So if you're thinking of taking a trip to Asia, I'd strongly urge you to check out China. I'm looking forward to heading back and exploring a few more corners of this fascinating country myself.