May Holiday

It seems the week before May Holiday I was still wearing my down-fill brown mid-calf lengh coat. Then on Monday of May Holiday, the weather finally decided that it was okay for Spring to come out. While were were in Beijing at the beginning of the week, I brought jeans and t-shirts for wear, wishing I had brought shorts. Now here I sit almost two weeks later wearing shorts and a tank top, wishing a had an air conditioner. It is so incredibly humid here! It's only 73 here and I'm hot. I'm normally cold-natured.
Enough of me complaining about the absurd weather, now I'm going to get to the fun stuff. Like I mentioned earlier, we went to Beijing for the first part of the week. After arriving and checking into our hotel, we went in search for food and not just any food, Western food (for those of you that don't know that is any food from countries in the western hemisphere and including Europe). That is why we went to Beijing, to comfort our homesickness with some good, familiar food.
We left our hotel and headed in one direction, then after deciding that we were going to wrong way, turned around and backtracked the other way. We ended up doing a gigantic circle. It turns out, where we turned around we were only a block from the restaurant. The restaurant, TGI Friday's was only two blocks from our hotel and we walked around probably 45 minutes before finding it. It was worth it. While the rest of them enjoyed burgers, I gobbled down some chicken strips with Jack Daniel's sauce. I highly recommend it. It was delicious.
We then hopped on a subway (a first for me). The air was so thick, you could cut it with a knife. Not may favorite part of the day, being smashed up against a hundred people in one car. We went to Tienanmen square and looked around while dodging people that wanted to either take pictures of us or with us. I had a hard time getting the picture of Kyle without someone we didn't know jumping into the picture.
We then went across the street and into the Forbidden City. That's where I took most of the pictures. We had been there before, but the Sneeds had not. This time around we got the automated tour guide. It was well worth the 40 kuai. I only wish we had gotten there sooner, because they started closing rooms before we were finished. You could spend an entire day there if you wanted.
The next day we went to the Pearl Market to do my favorite thing- shopping! I think this was my favorite day. All of you out there that love garage sales because you can bargain. This is your "heaven". I got some pretty jewelry and some other good souvenirs and in the mean time, I made some lady mad because I didn't want to buy her jade bracelets for what I was willing to pay for them. Something like that would have bothered me before, but I've become somewhat thick-skinned and assertive in the past two years. Later that night we went to an acrobat show. It was good. The Sneeds got some good video of it that you can see on their blog here. The next day we ate our last breakfast at Grandma's kitchen and then packed up at the hotel. Our last visit of the trip was on our way to the airport. We stopped at IKEA. I had never been to one before and I have to say now that I am a big fan. They have one in the Dallas area of which I'm sure we'll be visiting when we get back. The rest of the holiday was pretty uneventful-- just resting, grading and planning for the following week. Here is a slideshow of our pictres. I haven't streamed the videos to the computer yet. Hopefully, I'll get that done soon.