Beijing, China - Day #1 (of 11)

My brother, Ben, and my parents talked me into taking a trip to China with Nicholas. My parents have been teaching English there at a university for the last 2 school years. (If you are interested in looking at their blog, it's on my side bar...) Ben wanted to take his family of 5 to go see them and since Nicholas and Spencer are close in age, they thought it would be fun for us to come too. Actually, all my siblings were invited, but it wasn't feasible for the rest of them. My parents didn't meet up with us until Day 4 so we got to explore Beijing on our own. The first day we wandered around on foot like brave tourists, but the next 2 days we had tours lined up.
After 20 1/2 hours of travel (from boarding the plane in Seattle to finally getting to our hotel in Beijing), we slept about 7 hours and were then ready to hit the city! Here's our first breakfast at the Sunworld Hotel:

Ben and Spencer on the left, Eva, Rachel, Becca, and Nicholas on the right.

A busy market we decided to explore: (that's just a big mural covering the top half of the picture). We discovered some very interesting things, like, scorpions on a stick, sea horses on a stick, flat lizards and big black hairy spiders on a stick. All ready to be fried and then for you to eat! We saw some people carrying them around but no one actually eating them.

Ben, the kids, and me across the street from Forbidden City:

A big statue of Yao Ming (Chinese NBA player) as seen from Ben's hotel room: It takes up 3 stories of this 7 story building! The Chinese love him.
Ben, his kids, and Nicholas at Tiananmen Square:

You can see Mao entombed in a building here, but we arrived 10 minutes too late. This square is really just a huge lot, with big screens for advertisement and surrounded by government buildings. The current chairman lives only a couple blocks away.

Becca, Eva, Spencer, and Nicholas outside Forbidden City:

That evening we decided to take a taxi ride to see some acrobats. They were so amazing! And the taxi ride was definitely adrenaline-pumping! The Chinese do not use seat belts, there are no turn lanes, they don't yield to pedestrians or bikers and lots of swerving and honking. It is crazy and scary, yet there is no road rage either. Everyone on the street is quite aware of their surroundings and they just use common sense (in their opinion).

Hoop jumpers:

The muscle strength here is incredible!

There's about 7 girls on this bicycle. You can't even see the girl pedaling the bike as she has one girl sitting on her shoulders and another girl standing on hers!

Beautiful and colorful costumes at curtain call:

600 yuan! I'm rich! Actually, this only exchanges for about $90. It's interesting how the 100 yuan is their largest denomination of money, and that's only about 15 American dollars. That is a picture of Chairman Mao on the money.