I am a lazy blogger. I really really don't want to play catch up writing about the last week... but for my journals sake, I will.
To start off a fabulous trip we flew into Beijing with Air China on New Years EVE. By the way, Asian Airlines rock the house by far. Both Air China and Korean Air are very professional. They treat their flightees very well, the best yet :) Flying into Beijing, I had a window seat and I sat next to Jaimie. When we got in close enough, we noticed that there were fireworks going off... everywhere! From that high up, it is so neat to look down from an aerial view and see the city light up with fireworks and celebration. It was beautiful. From there, it only got more outrageous and crazy and fun! There were fireworks EVERYWHERE! So phenomenal. It sounded, and looked like a war zone. No joke. Big blasts, smoke, everywhere. Our bus from the airport was taking us to our hostel and fireworks were going off everywhere. There were people throwing fireworks out their windows and they would go off like mid way coming down.... people were lighting fireworks on the streets just feet away from us.We'd be driving and a huge bang would go off just above us. Insane. Imagine the 4th of July's grand finale.... and then times that by 10.... that was how Beijing was.... ALLL night long and into the morning. All week long. We woke up to fireworks, and went to sleep to fireworks.
The Hostel was marvelous. They were so great, so helpful. It was cheap, and clean, and warm. We met a lot of great people. Including Rick the Dutch man, Will the crazy Britian, Aruba man, Anita from Holland, Mark the genius American who lives in China doing nothing particular, and many more. Mark was funny. He went to MIT, which is supposedly an incredible school, close to an Ivy league school, and he lives in China at a hostel studying Chinese, writing books and playing in his one man band that is actually quite decent. Ha.
The next day we woke up to fireworks, old news; and got herded into a massive crowd of probably the entire population of Beijing. We had previous plans to attend this park that is supposed to throw a fantastic party for New Years day but rather... we just jumped in with the crowd (I say that like we had a choice, but we really didn't) and we were led into the Llama Temple. Which was great, because that was a sight we had eventually wanted to see, and we saw it at the best time ever! It was really so amazing to see all of the people burning their incense giving homage to Buddha. It was neat to see and witness the people in action doing something of such importance to them.
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