Wednesday, May 12th - Aquarium, etc.

( First off, my apologies for not keeping this blog up to date.  We've been running around like crazy since arriving in Beijing, and any free time I have has been spent updating Danny's blog (http://www.dannyschinatrip.blogspot.com/).  I will do my best to get information on this blog, but please be patient if it falls behind... )

On Wednesday we went to the "Blue Zoo" aquarium here in Beijing.  It was not nearly as big as the Shedd aquarium, but it was very nice and had some things that we had not seen before (check out Danny's blog for pictures of the Goblin shark!).  It was a good place to go to on Wednesday as we were recovering from jet-lag, etc.

After the aquarium we went back to the hotel and swam, which was nice and refreshing.  All in all, Wednesday was a pretty low-key day -- just what we needed.  :-)

Some things are amazingly cheap here.  We went to Carrefour, which is a shopping store just around the corner from the hotel.  I was amazed at the prices.  For example, you don't drink the tap water here in Beijing (if you do, you'll probably get sick), so you need to drink bottled water  Well, bottled water is around 0.8 to 1.2 Yuan per bottle, which translates to 12 to 18 cents per bottle!  Way cheaper than bottled water in the US.  We also saw a scooter (moped) in Carrefour for sale for 1899 Yuan, which is $277 (US) -- again, very inexpensive!  (I want one of these mopeds!!!)  And they sold little painted turtles (just like the kind I used to get when I was a kid growing up back in Iowa), plus little colored frogs and cute little puffer fish.  Each of these cost just under $2.00 (US) a piece.

We went out to dinner a local Chinese restaurant (Hua Jia Yi Yua), and the prices were incredibly cheap -- so cheap that we thought we weren't ordering enough food, but when the food arrived, we had *way* too much!  A big plate of pan fried noodles was around $5 (US), and (if I'm remembering correctly), the chicken and pork dishes were also only $5 (US) each.  The total was only 335 Yuan, which is $48.99 (which meant $25 per family), and it was really good food   Amazing...

[ By the way, I think I will be putting most of our pictures up on Flickr instead of attaching them to the blog -- this is because we cannot go in and directly edit the blog; we can only post things by sending emails to the blog, and we're limited by the size of the files we can send/post via email.  There are a number of sites you cannot access from within China, including blogger.com. blogspot.com, facebook.com, etc... ]