more, more, more

Yo!
i'm back! this is ben, once again.
after my initial happiness at being able to access our blog, i am now going to fill in a bit of the goings on here in China.
Beijing was awesome! So clean, new, safe feeling... a big, interesting city, albeit a bit hectic. We saw a lot of great sites, and successfully secured our visas to Laos, but are still without visas for Vietnam(not cool.) Some of the highlights....

The birds nest and water cube. We arrived around 5pm while it was still light out. The birds nest was awesome, but still just another large stadium. The water cube is actually quite underwhelmind during daylight hours. The walk up to the stadiums is really, really long and very very cold! As the sun set, the lights turned on and the nest turned a bright red and yellow color from within, very cool! we got tons of cool pictures, and were able to walk about halfway around the stadium. it is the one place in beijing where I was actually mobbed by people trying to sell me crap... i was shocked that i made it that long. the sun went down, and the water cube got more and more amazing. the color, a dark, dull grey in the day, turned to a bright beautiful blue at night... really cool! I took a million pictures, and will try to post some soon. i loved the scene, but was about to get frostbite. after forcing jin to take hundreds of pictures of me, and asking locals to take even more pictures of us, i started to feel like my vital organs were going in to hibernation, so sadly, we left.... nonetheless, very cool!

lama temple.... Jin's super nice friend Jeffrey took me, her, and our new friend ashley(a guy from london now living in japan) on a guided tour of the temple. It was really, really cool, and we got to see a lot of amazing statues of buddha. Jeffrey, who used to be a tour guide there, did a great job of showing us around and we definitely enjoyed it. the highlight for me, by far, was the 28m high buddha made out of a single tree(supposedly.) no pictures were allowed inside, so please google it, it was awesome. the buddha was inside its own special building, which was built around it! My first giant buddha! I wont forget it.

the temple of heaven. awesome! the building, a round multi tiered pagoda like structure was really cool. it was built in the 1400s, then destroyed in a fire and completely rebuilt about 100 years ago. the entire building, over 100 feet high was built without a single nail, screw, etc. the buildings were cool, but the highlight was the park and the overall scene of all the people hanging out. The people of beijing(and i suppose china in general) go outside to the parks and have a community spirit that is entirely absent in the US. There were literally hundreds, maybe thousands of people hanging out in the sprawling park. Some of the activities going on included, karaoke, people giving lectures/speeches, group singing, bands practicing, people playing board games, people playing hackey sack, tons of people slow dancing to music, people practicing english, and other people practicing their caligraphy with homemade brushes on the stone walkways with water(a sort of meditation.) As i walked through the throngs of people, i heard a guy yell towards me "financial crisis." i looked over and saw an older man and his grandson(i'm guessing.) he used me as a chance to practice the random english words he had picked up. he explained to me and jin the importance of continuing your education and that he was always trying to learn new things, even in his old age. his grandson, who was under ten, dutifully practiced his caligraphy on the ground using a homemade stick with a foam pointy tip, cut out by hand and attached to the stick with a string tied around it. the puffy stick, dipped in a yogurt container with water in it, was his pen for practicing his handwriting on the ground. The child would practice his chinese characters, while the grandfather talked to us. the grandfather, speaking to us about all sorts of topics, mostly focusing on the value of continuously learning, would write english words on the ground, using me as his momentary english teacher. he showed us an instrument that looked like an ostrich egg, but was made out of clay. the egg shaped object had a hole in the top and other holes scattered around it and was played like a flute. he played a traditional chinese folk song for us, and then moved on to "jingle bells!" he was so cute, and was a lot of fun to talk to!

the forbidden city.... just like the pictures. sooo big, and containing over 8000 different rooms! very interesting to see how the emperor lived and fascinating to imagine such a large and amazing space that was completely private and hidden from everyone but a few for such a long time! one of the highlights for me were definitely the museum of clocks, most of which were given to the emperor by english merchants doing business in china around 2 to 300 years ago. I imagine that each of the 100 to 200 amazing and totally unique timepieces was each worth well over 100k dollars(at least according to antiques roadshow!) i have never seen so many amazing old clocks in one place, all of which were super extravagant. i also really loved the gardens. the "grotesque" rock gardens, and the amazing twisting pine trees, were amazing. also, there were a couple of trees that were mat