Tibetin Houtang Trip

(NEW)

This week was full of many CRAZY adventures including our days at camp, nights on our own and the first half of the weekend. On Thursday we took our kids on a field trip to an art exhibit.... that was pretty interesting considering half of the galleries were of condoms (which we told the four year olds that they were balloons), karma sutra, and other very inappropriate things. Shows you how organized our site coordinator/point of contact is. Anyways we drug the kids around that all day and by the end decided that we needed a cold beer and went to our local regge bar and played card games and jenga all night. Anyways yesterday we went to a little huotang street with cute little shops and did that all night.
Today was really the highlight of my week. We woke up and took the subway to a place that we rented bikes. We biked all over Beijing and it was an amazingly beautiful day. We went to a Tibetan huotang which was actually one of my favorite places to go. There were tons of little shops here where you could get anything from jewelry to clothing and the whole street(or little ally) was full of little restaurants/bars that had extremely good food considering the fact that the food in China never failed to make my nose crinkle... The menus here were a little bit more descriptive and told you what kind of meat they were serving in comparison to the other.. well cheaper... restaurants we had previously ate at where the menu would say things like vegetables with meat. Lets just say that when you are in a country where the only things that speak English are the menus which were the only communication we had with the waiters... vegetables with meat is a very scary concept.

Right by the houtang was the Drum and Bell towers which were absolutly beautiful although we didn't want to caugh up the money to climb them when the only thing to see was a view of the city. We simply stayed on our bikes and discovered all the streets and back alleys of Beijing which I have to say was a close second to the Great Wall because they are the things that you don't get to see as a tourist. We must have biked over 20 miles that day, all the way across the city and back and it was about 3 dollars to rent the bike for a day.