8. Beijing Pictures

Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven

9. More Mongolia Photos

We had a couple people ask what a Ger was so here's a photo of the inside and the outside of a Ger we slept in around August 20th when it snowed on us! You might have heard of a "Yurt," and a Ger is about the same thing. We also liked this photo of a traditional Mongolian man in a small town.

Back In China

We made it back to Beijing and found a hostel for half the price we found the first time we were in Beijing, and in a way cool location a couple blocks from the Forbidden City and on a really cute outdoor market street. We spent one night there using our day to visit another cool temple and the Pearl Market which offered tons of knock off items such as an iphone for around $130 but it was so obviously not real. Rusty actually enjoyed shopping! The bargaining was really fun and hilarious, but we only bought a few cheap luggage locks and retractable earphones.

We caught a train that evening to Pingyao, which may likely be one of our favorite cities we've ever visited. It is so adorable being surrounded by a city wall with all the traditional architecture preserved. It may even be more interesting than Tallin, Estonia. We'll be heading to Xi'an to see the Terracotta warriors in a couple days (for a more historical / hysterical account of the warriors, see Mummy 3, the movie). After Xi'an we plan to head toward Tibet on the highest train ever built (ask Kelsi's dad for interesting engineering details).

Pictures pending more time (they take a really long time to transfer from camera - esp. on the super slow internet we've been running into).

Good Job Dad!

OK this was a great experience. So, thanks to Kelsi's great mentoring by her dad, we brought a whistle with us on our trip. All hostels have a sign posted that says not to go out after midnight as it is not safe, plus we heard TWO stories in ONE night of muggings by other people staying in our hostel. One of the muggings was three locals against two guys. So we have Kelsi wear the whistle anytime we're out after it's dark and last night we got to use it. It was kind of hilarious. The stories of the muggings generally included being bumped into a bit by a small group and pick pocketed in the process. Well, we happened into a perfect place to get bumped into by 4-5 guys, actually, & they were acting like they wanted to show us something - maybe to buy - but mostly they were blocking the sidewalk where we couldn't get by since there was a building on one side and a tree fenced area on the other. We were trying to brush them off & get past, but then it clicked that this looked exactly like stories we heard. So Kelsi started blowing the whistle, which startled them and scattered the group. It was kind of hilarious but also potentially saving us from loosing a few bucks. Anyway, we laughed about it for the rest of our walk home.

We take a train Friday morning back to Beijing, so we've had a few days to kill. We took an overnight trip to a nearby national park, checked out some local temples, the "black" market and attended a fantastic traditional Mongolian music & dance concert. The throat singing is amazing. We thought of a good description for how the Mongolian music and dance culture seemed to us: it's Asia meets America West 1800s. They were wearing beautiful Asian costumes with some Asian country horse riding type music while dancing like they were riding a horse. We also went to 2 movies of the 3 they have showing. One of them was The Mummy 3 played in English with Mongolian subtitles. The other 2 were in Mongolian without any English, but we went to one anyway because it was Ghengis Khan and we thought it would be interesting & we'd get most of the idea. We were relieved after two hours when the theater staff killed the show and flipped on the lights in the middle of the Khan's grand coronation scene.