Hot touches all around

Sunday was one of the best days I had in Beijing which was a good way to spend an almost last day. It started off with being late to meet Lianfeng, his wife and his friend for lunch. We decided to go to a traditional Beijing style restaurant which was good. It was a lot of food for my just waking up belly. We had to place food on a nearby table because we ordered so much. I tried all the food Beijing is famous for while everyone else ate food that they thought was much better. It was all good though.




After the lunch we went to the Tianyi market which I wish I had know about when I moved into Beijing. It is the wholesale market where most stores buy their goods. You can buy single items but start getting pretty steep discounts as you buy more things. There is not much bargaining which is really pretty nice. It is amazing though how much the things they sell there are marked up for at other places. We walked around so I could get a good taste for what was being offered. After that I bought more presents than I have room for. Hua is coming back this weekend though and is willing to carry everything for me so I got that going for me which is nice.


After the awesome market I headed up to Hou Hai which is the lake area north of the Forbidden City. This was one of those areas that I had gone to early on in my time in Beijing. It was cool then but looked like it would be nicer as the weather improved. I had always meant to go back and did make it back for a minute with my dad but never really spent any time there. That was a mistake. If I ever go back to Beijing I would like to stay in that area. It was a lot of fun just walking around and taking everything in.


I ended up staying there for around 5 hours which is a lot of time to spend walking around but it was all worth it. I saw people with tattoos which were a rarity and they had good music stores. I was sold at that point. The rest was just icing. The stores were cool. I do not even like browsing that much but ended up going in most of the stores around there and buying a couple of small things for the house when I get back.

This reminded me one of my friends tattoos from high school. He got the Alpha and the Omega on either arm and the text "I am the begining... (Other arm) and the end". Look up the spelling of those words when you get a chance and you will experience the shock he did.


Grrr... Angry bear.


I had dinner at Nuage which was a pretty good Vietnamese place and then had a drink a la fresco (which means to the fresco or outdoors in French Italian). Overall a really pleasant way to spend my last weekend day in Beijing.