Sad day…our last day in Beijing and only a half a day at that! In the morning we got up, had breakfast, and took a taxi to an antique market. It was so much fun and it was huge! We wondered around just like you would at a flea market. We got a lot of good finds to bring home for ourselves and as gifts for people. We wondered around for a couple of hours and bought quite a bit. It was pretty easy to barter prices down and that just helped in wanting to buy more! I found some great stuff to bring back to my family as gifts and I cannot wait to send them off when I get home!
After the antique market, Taylor and I headed over to the Pearl Market. We walked in and it looked just like a mall. First thing we spotted…Starbucks. We both got a cold brew with milk and hazelnut. Heavenly, it tasted heavenly. We started walking around and found a seller with a lot of silk. This is something we were looking for the whole time we have been in China. We tried some on and bartered the price down. Once she got pretty low we decided to take it and bought a couple of things. We then took the escalator up to the second floor. We didn’t make it past the first store we saw…purses. Boy did I buy purses.
After spending my whole bank account, we headed back to the hotel to meet Art and Jim. We checked out of the hotel and headed to the train station to catch the train back to Wuhan. We had to wait a little but for our train so ate some McDonalds for lunch and just sat and waited. We boarded the train and left 1 minute early! This was a lot nicer than our train ride to Beijing that was delayed. Well, the train took about 2 hours longer than it was supposed to. Our 4 hour ride turned into 6 hours. To say we were restless towards the end is an understatement. We decided that since it was getting so late we would just skip the subway and pay for a taxi to get back to our hotel.
When we got to the train station we went to KFC for dinner and then ventured out to find a cab. About 3 said no to us and we finally got into the 4th one. Well about 2 blocks into the ride he kicked us out of the cab! He kept reading the piece of paper we gave him but couldn’t figure out where we were supposed to go. I really think he didn’t know how to read because he seemed upset and frustrated every time he looked at our paper. WE then had to wait in a cab line for about an hour. We got into our cab and finally got back to the hotel. This poor cab driver though needed reading glasses and couldn’t really read where our hotel was because the writing was too small. We made it though!
We had an amazing weekend in Beijing. I wish we could have been there longer but the time we had was well worth it. It makes me anxious to come back and explore more!
-Jami-
Jami and Taylor 