Fuzzy Friday

The following day, Friday, our guide Lisa walked us to a huge nearby park and helped us buy tickets to enter the park.  The park had some really interesting sculptures, including one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart--the plaque was written in Chinese and German.  There was a good sized lake with paddle boats that you could rent, and a children's area on the other side of the park.  The park was lovely and very well kept, but it was 32C, very humid and very "hazy".  Add that to our extreme jet lag, and we spent less than an hour in the park before we headed back to the hotel.  We passed a "hundred porridge" shop--our guide had told us that flavored porridges were a popular dish with the Chinese.  There were lots and lots of stores, most of them small, some of them no bigger than 10ft x 10ft.  There were a lot of alleys with stores in them, some of them seemed to have small houses at the end.  Some of the alley ways were full of people walking in and out, and it would have been interesting to go see what was down them, but we (in reality it was Maddy, more on that later) were a big enough spectacle that I didn't want to cause problems, and I did NOT want to get lost someplace where we couldn't communicate.   

Friday night we went to the Hard Rock Cafe Beijing, but only because it was attached to the hotel.  We had a very blurry meal--it was hard to be hungry when we were so tired.  We attempted to get souvenirs in their shop, but they had almost zero inventory--they carried four different kids of shirts, but each style came in only one size, and it was never the size that you needed or wanted.