Sara's Asian Adventure: Beijing Day 0.5, 1, and 2

Per and I left Tianjin on Thursday night to visit Beijing for the weekend. After getting Subway, we took the taxi to the Tianjin train station and jumped on a fast train to Beijing. The train goes up to 320 km/hour and it takes about 30 min to get to Beijing. The trains were nice and clean, and you could barely tell you were speeding so quickly down a train track.

We took a taxi to The Radisson and hit the hotel bar. Had some gin and tonics and a few beers. Then we went to the room to sleep. Both of us were very excited for Friday and our trip to the zoo!

Well...as they say, things don't always go as planned. Both Per and I had very rumbly tummys in the morning and, let's just say the trips to the bathroom were frequent. In an attempt to regain the day, we visited the hotel breakfast, only to find that that was not at all helpful to our stomach. We spent the day in the hotel room (good thing we upgraded), drinking water, struggling with stomach cramps, and taking turns in the bathroom. We believe our dinner at a Chinese restaurant Wednesday night was probably the culprit! It was the 1st Chinese restaurant we went to (besides dumplings), and after a ruined Friday in Beijing, I'm not looking to go back! We crossed our fingers and went to bed, hoping that our stomachs will have recovered by Saturday morning. Thanks Pepto!

Saturday morning we woke up in slightly better condition, Per was still feeling pretty bad, but he was a trooper and we went to the zoo! We canceled the food tour we were supposed to take, deciding that pandas were more important!

Seems like the Beijing Zoo is full of sleeping animals. I don't think we saw many of them move at all! Probably all sedated so they stay still and don't hide from the millions of small children dying to see them.

The pandas were cute but lazy!

But not always lazy, because this one managed to get himself up into a tree where he scartched himself a few times and then decided to take a nap.

There were of course lots of other animals at the zoo, but the zoo itself is kinda run down and I think a lot of the animals are depressed. Their surroundings were pretty pathetic. I won't post any of the pictures of the lions or tigers or elephants or anything because they just look kinda sad. But I did get this nice pictures of a crane:And Per with the Giraffs giving the sterotypical Chinese picture pose:

We also visited the aquarium which is newer and less depressing. Be careful in the aquarium though, there are steep slops everywhere:The slopes are steep too! (Per didn't get why I thought this was funny)

There was also a sign by the fish pond that read "No feeding with nonspecial foodstuffs." But people fed them anyway:

Me with a cute sharky thing, also doing the Chinese picture pose:After seeing a number of small children, I was also introduced to Chinese baby buttless pants. I tried to get a picture but our camera was not working with me! I will get one and post it later. Apparently babies here don't wear diapers, they have holes in the bitt of their pants so they can just squat when they gotta go, which I assume leads to a lot of really unpleasant messes.

After the zoo, we went home, got some food, and had massages! It was GREAT! :)

Then we went to a very famous restaurant in Beijing called Da Dong. It is famous for Beijing roast duck, and it was DELICIOUS! We had to wait for a table, here is a picture of my handsome fiancé :)

Here is the guy carving our delicious ducky!

To finish off our declicious dinner, we were served CORN ICE CREAM. So strange. And we ordered some typical Beijing desserts which were not a success. All the desserts here are made from bean and gelatin and just kinda strange.