Sight Seeing in Beijing!

We have had such a fun and amazing day. Friends of ours from church are living here in a near-by city and happened to be staying in Beijing today and yesterday. We have had such fun hanging out with them touring this amazing city. Today we saw the Forbidden City, saw the old side of Beijing (very cool), spent some time at the Wangfujing Night market shopping for treasures and avoiding the strange food... snake, scorpion, cicada and other strange unidentifiable "food". Such a different world.

Unfortunately I am having trouble posting pictures. Hopefully tomorrow Patterson can help us and we'll get some pics up. The smog is unbelievable. I couldn't imagine anything like this was real. Our lungs actually hurt after about and hour outside. It's terrible. My throat still burns. We did see the sun trying very hard to peek out for about 30 seconds but it was smothered instantly and went away for the rest of the day.

Although the smog is bad it's nothing in comparison to the way the Chinese drive. Wow. It's just unreal. Imagine 1,000 people trying to fit through a regular size door all at once from four different directions with the only ground rule being that you shouldn't kill anyone... people are crossing the street jumping out of the way of cars. Literally jumping. I have never seen anything like it. It's so funny and no one gets angry ....it's just the way it is:-)

Well, I'm going to sleep. We have an early morning tomorrow. Silk and pearl markets then a Ball in the evening. Talk to you soon! Jen

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Jennifer Hunt