We finished travels through China with five days in Beijing. After experiencing a lot of culture shock during our month in China, we finally felt we were beginning to fit in. I no longer wince when someone spits on the ground too close to my shoes, and my legs have gotten a lot stronger from all the squat toilets. We are pros at navigating the subways (which are nearly identical in all China’s big cities), and we have too many new favorite foods to count. We were lucky with the weather in Beijing, with the exception of one rainy day, and the air pollution, though noticeable, was not at its worst. We walked around many different neighborhoods including the 798 Art District, Peking University, the Olympic village, and Tiananmen Square. As China’s capital, Beijing has food from around the country. We used our time there to have some of our favorites including Xi’an style skewers, spicy Sichuan prawns, and dim sum. We visited the Forbidden City and the China Aviation Museum, which has a unique collection of Russian and Chinese aircraft, including Chairman Mao’s planes. We spent our last evening having a drink on Houhai Lake before eating a quick dinner of surprisingly good pizza at Pizza Saporita. We are now in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, where we are preparing to set out on a two-week journey through the Gobi Desert staying in gers (portable round tent houses) with nomadic families. Mongolian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet, and as a former Soviet state, the country has some distinctly Russian architecture. We will ride in a Russian van across the country on this tour: http://www.tourinmongolia.com/gobi-desert-navel-eight-lakes-tour--12-days--.html.
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September 2018
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