May 17
We can’t believe that this is our last day in Beijing. The time as flown by and we are scrambling to
take care of last minute shopping and site-seeing before our late night
departure. Annie and I have made plans
to meet up with Chris and his girlfriend to do a little shopping and we head
downstairs around 9:30. Paulie is off to
the zoo with Sam and possibly Hudson for the last day. We are off to the Silk Market and pick up Jolie
at the Qianmen metro to make the trek to our shopping destination. She is delightful and it seems that Chris is
quite smitten with her. We arrive and
devise a plan to split up and meet after an hour to reassess whether we want to
continue shopping or not. Annie and I
make a beeline for the basement and the Tory Burch area for a purse and shoes
for Bonne. We use this excuse to revisit
the items that we may also want to purchase and Annie finds a great bag in the meantime. Afterward, we continue on to the jeans and
raincoats before meeting Chris and Jolie at the designated spot. We drag them back to our shoes and purses
before venturing up to the 4th floor to purchase a Chinese ipad for
a very tiny price. Then we decide to
head out for a wonderful lunch in a part of town we had not yet visited. We take a taxi to the hutong and enjoy this
very small neighborhood street scene with the small boutique shops. We make our way up some very steep and narrow
stairs to a rooftop garden eating area.
It is certainly nice to have someone along who speaks the language and
we order and have food at our table in no time flat. Our meal is wonderful and with the open air
seating and the wonderful spring day, it is a very memorable event. After a while we venture back to the street
and browse through the shops till we arrive at the end of the street. Despite the late hour, we opt to go back to
the Pearl Market to see if we can get a few gifts before returning to the
hotel. We make our way to that part of
town and exhaust both ourselves and all the shopping opportunities before
taking a taxi home. We arrive around
5:45 and have a short time before we are to meet up with Chris for our final
meal of Peking Crispy Duck. We find a
small restaurant on the walking street and enjoy a most delicious meal before
going home to chill for a couple of hours before we have to head out to the
airport. We get all packed up and
showered before heading upstairs for a last few rounds of pool and a beer
before saying our goodbyes to Chris and all of the King’s Joy Hotel staff. Somehow, we hail a large minivan taxi at the
foot of our hotel who agrees to take us to the airport for a mere 200Yuan. We jump at the chance and are off to the
airport with time to spare. We arrive at
some underground parking nightmare garage where the minivan drops us off and we
have to fight the other passengers to get off of the enormous elevator that
delivers us to the terminal. We get in a
VERY long line of people who are on our 2:00am flight and wait an endless
amount of time before depositing our luggage at the counter. We head through customs, which is a bit of a
challenge and then have to take a train to our gate. This airport is huge and once we arrive at
the gate we are almost immediately told to board the plane. This is going to be a very long flight, but
we are hopeful as we have head that Qatar Airlines offers super service. We will see!
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