Shane's visit

I am finally getting around to blogging about Shane's visit; I've been so busy since he left that the post kind of got away from me.  But I did not want to forget because I want to remember his visit in the future, and it was my last time with a visitor in China!  I felt so much more comfortable getting around with each set of visitors, the difference between my facility in talking and traveling between when Max was here in October and Shane's visit in April is really astounding!

He was only here for 5 days, because he missed his flight from Nashville to Beijing, which made for a really quick trip.  He still got to see all the major things he wanted to though, and I even fit in a few sightseeing places I hadn't been to before!  

On his first day, we went up to the Olympic Park, where I have been before, but we walked down a different side of the Green and saw a completely different set of statues!  All of them are athlete-oriented in some way, but some of them are pretty neat!

We also went to a large active Buddhist temple, and saw a super tall female Buddha statue.  I thought this picture of two temple buildings next to each other was cool:

One evening, we went to a cooking class at the Hutong, the Chinese Cultural center where I sometimes take tai chi classes.  It was cooking in the style of a Chinese ethnic minority from southern China, near Guilin where I went with Andrew.  We had a blast taking turns with the huge cleaver and standing at the front cooking in front of the class.  And it was sooo yummy!

I know you've seen a picture of this restaurant already from my Judy/Lisa posts, but I took Shane to eat hotpot after his trip to the Great Wall, and I just like this picture of us:

One place I had not been was the Botanical Gardens; I have been saving them for the springtime.  They are super far away, it took us about 2 hours to get there, but it was worth it.  It was a HUGE park with different sections for different types of flowers/plants/trees.  Some of the sections were not in bloom, like the perennials (that were actually kind of dead…oops), the autumn garden, the rose garden, and the conifer garden i imagine looks pretty similar year-round.  Other sections, however, like the Cherry Blossom garden, and the Tulip Garden, were colorful and amazing!  Chinese people enjoy photographing colorful nature, so there were plenty of shutterbugs out that day!

And my favorite flowers, of course!  Purple!

We finished up his trip at Da Dong Duck, my favorite restaurant in Beijing, and while I'll spare you the ubiquitous picture of our table, I did get some unique pictures (although fuzzy, sorry) of the ducks roasting in a row in the oven, and the duck cookers all standing around the duck hanger.  Mmm…so good!  I will miss Peking Duck once I'm home!