McNaughton's China Trip

We took a tour of the old city today, an area called Hu Tong. It's this labarynth of little alley-like roads with family houses sharing a common courtyard. Old city. Here's a picutre of Shellye and me in our rickshaw before the tour. Afterward we went up into the old Drum tower where the drums were beaten to tell the city, among other things, what time it was. Across the plaza was a bell-tower with a 63-ton bell (behind us in the picture).

We went back to the hotel and then went out to eat at this little chop-house for lunch. Very yummy. After a 30-minute power nap we were off to an acrobat show that was recommended to me by a guy I know in the Embassy here. Here is a picture of the front off the theater. We've never seen anything like it. Just when you thought they couldn't do anything more incredible they'd wow us again. The folks we went with said it was similiar to Circus Solei in terms of the talent performing. There's just no way to describe it in words on a blog.

After the show, that's when the high-adventure started. The same guy who told us about the show also recommended an "authentic" place to get Peking Duck. We had the name of restaurant written on a piece of paper and we showed it this cab driver. Thirty-minutes and $4 later (cabs are cheap!!) we were in the general area and we were supposed to walk down these little alleys to find the place. It wasn't the picture of personal security but we finally found it. If the word "joint" exists in Chinese, this place would have had its picture in the dictionary definition, loud, smokey, greasy, packed -- but with great food. We had a "reservation" for a general time period which meant -- well, basically, nothing. But luckily the four us showed up at the same time as this other group of four so we shared a table for eight, our new best friends -- a German dude, his Chinese sister, a girl from Vietnam and this Chinese guy named George -- I'm not making this stuff up. Here is a picture of our table, the duck oven (which I'm not entirely thankful I saw) and some poor ducks waiting to get into the oven.

It's actually the morning of the 27th as I write this are were taking off in a few hours to the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and Tienamen Square. Will keep you posted.