Calling it quits

Well, I leave tomorrow morning from my Olympic adventure, so time to wrap things up here I suppose. This has been quite an experience, but I'm ready to come home.
First, though, a few closing thoughts.
Coming to the Olympics was an amazing experience that I'm grateful I got to have. Seeing the events I went to, especially track and field, was probably the highlight for me in terms of the Olympics stuff. But I enjoyed making the contacts for the magazine, which I think went reasonably well considering I was tasked with finding several people I've never met before in one of the world's largest cities where nobody remotely speaks the same language I do.
China is a remarkable place, of course, but as the food stories have suggested, a bit intimidating to get a handle on when you're by yourself. Still, by and large, except for maybe the air in the subways (and, well, outside the subways too) I did enjoy myself here.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by to share my experience here with me. I enjoyed your comments and I'm looking forward to telling you all the other stories I didn't write about.
See you soon!

Dish of the day

My trip is winding down here, so this will be the last dish of the day. And this one, according to my Haidian District guidebook, is as good as any to send it out:
Page 40, the Yibeyuan Restaruant. The specialties of the house? "Fried towel with wild chili, silver cod in pot."
Fried towel anyone?

Say, Grace

Funny moment from yesterday I forgot to mention: I'm coming out of a store when a young Chinese woman stops me to practice her English, which happens a lot here.
Her: Hi, my name Grace, where you from?
Me: Um, Los Angeles.
Her: Oh, American! You surprise me!
Me: Why's that?
Her: Americans very fat, you so slim!
Me: Thanks, Grace. (Although in my brain it went like this: Um, when all you offer me to eat here is donkey meat pot and honey nachos and go-to-court with son and variegated crap heads, what do you expect?)
I'm already ready for a huge meal of something I mostly recognize back home...

Hot pot fun

After all that strolling, Kevin and I were pretty famished and he suggested a truly Chinese experience for my last culinary treat here: Hot pot.

Not quite like the "hot dish" they have in Minnesota. In this version, you buy a bunch of meat and vegetable and dip them into one of two vats of water that boil in front of you. The vat on the left in this photo is the soothing, pleasant-tasting one. The vat on the right is the spicy one, and holy cow is it spicy.

And of course, no meal in this city can come without something absolutely egregiously mis-translated on the menu. Among our options were "variegated crap heads" and "fresh grass crap slices." I kid you not.

Mmm, crap slices.

We opted out of those and stuck mostly with beef. It was all quite tasty and I felt like I had finally had a reasonably authentic Chinese meal before I left here. The only downside? That hot pot gets awfully steamy and after a day walking a bazillion miles in the heat and humidity, I had had enough of steam. Or, maybe it was an appropriate way to end the day.

Summer in the city

We had commandeered Benny for the full day, so after the wall, we had him take us over to the Summer Palace, one of Beijing's other popular attractions. It used to be an inner-city getaway for emperors and empresses, but had a long history of plundering and fires, until eventually it became a must-see attraction for commoners. (How's that for condensing hundreds of years of history...)

It was peaceful, and like most things here, enormous. The grounds go on forever it seems and you can hop into different temples and dwellings or just stroll around the various lakes and canals. We had our wall feet under us, so we just strolled and explored the grounds a bunch. It was really nice there, and with a few more hours to spend, there would have been a great deal more to see.

Hitting the wall

Today I visited the Great Wall and it is difficult to process how incredibly cool and impressive it is. Earlier this week, my former co-worker Kevin who now lives in Beijing had set up with a taxi driver friend of his to take us out for the day. "Benny" picked us up early, about 7 or so, and we set off for the 90-minute drive to the section we planned to visit.

To get up to this stretch, you have to take a ski lift. But when you get to the top, you walk around the top of the wall. And walk. And walk. And walk.

The stretch we were on went for several miles. Some of the time you're on stairs, some of the time the ground is flat. Most of the time it is quite steep. Today was considerably hot and extremely humid, so it was nice when you made it to one of the towers, where you could stand inside and feel a decent breeze.

We did an extrordinary amount of walking. Perhaps the most impressive thing was that Benny joined us and insisted on carrying my beloved Ski Utah bag and Kevin's heavier camera bags. And he did the whole thing wearing loafers. While chain-smoking. And not breaking a sweat. It was almost as impressive as the wall.

The stretch we were on of course is just one of hundreds, and there was so much rock on the thing that I actually can't get my brain around the amount of planning and engineering and work involved in ever putting the entire wall together. How is it possible?

I could go on, but I won't. But I will say that it was so much to take in, that when we finally got down to grab a bite to eat, I was shocked that we had been up there almost six hours. It felt like about one.

Suffice to say there's a reason the Great Wall has become so iconic. It certainly deserves it.

Closing down

Well, the Olympics officially came to end tonight here in Beijing. Unfortunately, I didn't have tickets to the ceremony. Tickets for even the lamest of Olympic sports were pretty hard to come by, and the opening and closing ceremonies were considered the hardest of the lot. As a security precaution, tickets were not even transferrable for these games, meaning you needed to provide passport numbers and identification with each ticket. If your name didn't match the ticket assigned, you weren't getting in.

In any case, I watched the ceremonies from my television, which broadcast them on about 10 of the 50 or so CCTV government-sponsored stations here. Nothing compares to that opening ceremony, but the closing was very nice. If you watch, keep an eye out for the mayor of London, whose name might as well be Mayor McDoofus. Yikes, someone tell that guy to at least button his coat. He was my favorite part of the whole thing.

Well, that's not true. Although it may be a bit blurry up there, when the fireworks went off at the end, I got a fantastic view from my 24th floor hotel room. My hotel isn't anywhere near the Olympic Green, but I still got quite a show.

And while the games may be over, my adventure continues for one more day. On tap for tomorrow, a trip to China's must-see attraction: The Great Wall.