China: Last Day!!!

oh wow, it's the last day in china and the last day of our trip officially :( kind of sad.  that means we have to return back to reality and get ready for school and work lol  

luckily, it ended well and christine and i are ready to go home and fully appreciate what we have in america lol
Yes, I'm pretty sad that the happy dream of our trip is over QQ  But so ready to go home.  China was a good ending for our trip.

woke up early for breakfast in the marriott and enjoyed the lovely view of china from the window.  Lovely being, of course, a subjective term.

 Breakfast view, featuring an exquisite eatery, a picturesque alleyway decorated with trash, and sparkling grey smog.

LOL :D your descriptive imagery and masterful english makes it sound much less awful than it really was 

per suggestion of our tour guide, we visited lama temple, which has a huge collection of buddhas.  as with everything in china (and formerly a palace too) it's also really really big lol we kept walking along a central axis and passed through like 10 temples, each with at least 3 buddha statues.  the largest one was HUGE! carved from one piece of wood, it was like....34 meters tall = 102 feet-ish? and i can't even guess the diameter of the tree they must've used. 

while christine and i were just walking around and taking pictures, lots of people were actually worshipping there. each person carried in a bundle of incense sticks in order to pray to pretty much every buddha statue in the whole lamastery.  it was nice to just sit out in the semi-nice weather and just talk :)

That was a nice visit to a temple, because it was actually the only temple we visited at our own pace (we never visited any in Japan).  There was a lot of incense burning and worshipping, which was really interesting to me, because I rarely see that.  Everyone has their own way of praying and worshipping; some people seem very serious, some bow and kneel multiple times, and some just put their hands together briefly.  I wonder a lot about theology and why people do what they do, believe what they believe, and worhip how they worship.  Maybe someone who knows theology can explain to me XD

But, um, that's completely off-topic.  The Buddhas were huge and plentiful.  We got reprimanded for taking pictures multiple times, but I still got quite a few XD  Check out that huge Buddha.

Okay, it's sort of hard to express how massive this Buddha was from the pictures... just keep in mind that the legs (first picture) were all we could see when we walked into the temple building.  We probably came up to his ankle, if even.  For the second picture, I was kneeling and shooting upwards, and I still didn't get quite all of him, I think.

left after to see the olympic buildings, particularly the bird's nest and water cube.  started raining when we left the crowded subways but we still managed to get some decent pictures.  it's sooooo nice in the olympic area lol and also massive. it took us forever to get back up and down the olympic green. by that time, we just were so tired that we went back to the hotel to get lunch and relax :P

There were also these interesting watermarked(?) Chinese characters written on the ground on the way to the Olympic stadiums.

 

The stadiums themselves were, like everything else in China that we've seen, HUGE.  We walked from end to end twice on accident, because we thought that there was a subway station on the other end (but there wasn't, so we had to walk back XD)  Aside from the rain, it was pretty nice, because we got to see the big buildings from the Olympics, and they were impressive :3  But our feet/pants got soaked despite having umbrellas, so our socks were going squish all the way back ;;

Ling Long Pagoda

Bird's Nest

Water Cube

National Indoor Stadium

we actually explored the 5th floor food court that we had lunch in today and found out that it was connected to a huge mall with an awesome supermarket on the basement floor :D we got some stuff lol  Some stuff... haha, more like we were wide-eyed over how big the mall was as we came down the escalator from this tiny food court (it's like a regular mall that we have, except imagine that the whole place is one big department store of 5 floors).  And then we go to the supermarket and find all this unusual food (chips, drinks, etc) and get ridiculously excited about it.  We were seriously more excited about it than we've been about most other things, haha.  Apparently one lady was watching us and was amused by how amused we were XD  If you saw us, you'd probably think we're crazy girls.  By the way, we had to get our green tea sprite again, because we forgot the previous one in the hotel fridge XD;;   (Wth I'm  such a pig with all that food.... KIDDING, IT'S NOT FOR ME OKAY...)  lol i don't think anyone judges you :P who can resist trying blueberry and kiwi lays or ketchup chips or seaweed pringles? wow we're really unhealthy..... 

went back to wangfujing later in the afternoon.  we found this interesting book: 101 Stories for Foreigners to Understand Chinese People in the foreign bookstore and it turns out that it's out of print and particularly expensive on amazon so we went back for it :P and also we wanted to try more exotic food lol we first chickened out of trying one of the other bugs because we didn't know which was which lol we went further down the street and found a vendor selling giant! scary black scorpions, salamanders and millipedes :P christine thought it'd be a cop-out if i just went for a salamander so we ended up picking the silk worm cocoon instead of the cicadas lol we were just particularly worried that the cocoons would ooze juice or something strange lol 

they were definitely interesting.  if you've ever eaten the shell off of crispy shrimp, then you can imagine what cocoon tastes like haha except add several layers of shell instead of one.  And inside, it had sort of a layer of something... not oozing or juicy, but squishy and kind of gritty.  christine also bought candied grapes so we offsetted the taste with that at the end lol  Those were pretty good :3  We went from being heroes to warriors, and today we are... I dunno, what's the promotion from warriors?  We've been very brave these days, I think >w<

left back to the hotel since we have to wake up at 4am to make it to the airport to catch our flight.

dinner was leftover steamed pork buns we bought in wangfujing with wheat/strawberry milk tea and green tea sprite that we bought from the supermarket earlier in the day. we pigged out while watching mtv and being super silly :)  We are such pigs!  I feel like a total glutton XD  All we've done is eat today.  And actually, the past couple of days.  

AND THE SONG WE'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR FINALLY CAME BACK ON MTVYAYHAPPYWIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i'm definitely going to miss being on vacation! lol

Man, wth is with all these really awful embarrassing pictures of us...lol ehhhhhh *shrugs* at least this blog is search engine blocked :D