Car Horns Must Wear Out Quickly In China

As I'm sure you learned from Laura's post, we went to the Great Wall today. We signed up for a shuttle bus that goes to a less busy section, and it turned out we were the only ones going. Instead of a bus we went in a sedan, and lucked into a private tour of Beijing. Traffic here is crazy, and people here loooooove to honk, so I decided to count how many times our driver honked throughout the day. This idea came to me after his first 10-15 honks, so the official number is a little lower than what it should be.
And the grand total is... 119. Yep, if you want to launch a business venture into China, you should manufacture car horns.

China I

Hey ya'll!

We're in Beijing. It's freakin' CRAZY here. Initial impressions:
1-smog is about a million times worse that you read about.
2-people drive like they have a death wish.
3-things are uber cheap.
4-it's more like Mexico than anywhere I've been.
5-everything's covered in a thin layer of dirt, but I haven't seen anything disgusting yet.
6-...let's just say that people in Japan are really nice ;-).

We climbed the Great Wall today. It's was totally epic. Amazing. Maybe the most amazing thing I've ever done/seen. We hired a private tour guide and driver for the day-it was about...$90? For like 7 hours. They took us to the wall, a silk factory (where we bought some stuff) and to a tea ceremony. The teas were amazing, but I only bought one. We bought some stuff at the wall too (souvenir-y type stuff).

Anyways, I'm starving for some Pekin Duck, so I'm outta here. I'm soooooooo tired from today, so I think I'll be crashing early. More posts later!!

Laura :O

Last post for a bit

We leave for Beijing on Wed and will get back next Mon. We'll try to post pictures sometime next week. In the meantime, here's a random pic. I'm sure you can guess what it's for. I translated the top line and it comes out roughly to 'Disposal is a fun favour'. Yay!

We're currently gearing up for China. Our last work week (and a couple days) is starting up right now, and then we're off to Beijing for a week. The week that we're going is a massive holiday for about 90+% of Japan called 'Golden Week'. It consists of a string of back-to-back holidays, and since everyone's on vacation, it's extremely busy everywhere, and traveling within Japan is VERY expensive. It's actually cheaper to go on vacation outside the country during this time - hence China.

Looking forward to it. Should be making one more blog post before then.

Brian.

The newest little Dyck

Today Laura and I became an Aunt and Uncle. Our nephew's name is Ethan (hope the spelling's right). Congratulations to Dave and Katie. We love and miss you.

Hal

Say hello to Hal.

These are EVERYWHERE in Japan. My guess is they are an emergency station (fire, etc), but every time I ask it to tell me what its purpose is, it says 'I'm sorry Brian, I'm afraid I can't do that'. Meh. Should be fine...

Sorry, another late post.

Getting back into the swing of things for work, though thankfully, we only have 4 weeks until the next break. We went and booked a trip to China, so we're doubly looking forward to the 29th.

Had a lot of fun while my parents were here. Disneysea was a blast, and Kyoto was amazing. Here's a random pic of our adventures in Japan.

This one's from our hotel in Kyoto. A vending machine that offers 'casual frozen foods'. Hot of course. I just loooove that Takoyaki (fried octopus in a ball of batter) is considered casual (though if you're Japanese, it really would be). Enjoy!