iTourguide

Jenny and Amanda arrived on Friday afternoon and we’ve been busy seeing most everything Beijing has to offer a curious tourist. I kept them up as late as I could on Friday night and they’re handling the jetlag okay.  I showed them youku.com and Google music on their second night, and they kept themselves awake streaming free television shows and downloading free (and legal!) music.

We hit the Beijing Zoo on Saturday with the main purpose of visiting the pandas.  If you’re going to come to China, you need to see the pandas, right? Here’s what a popular Beijing guidebook says about the zoo:

The inhabitants of the Beijing Zoo are saddled with grimly dated design features – concrete and glass cells – but the crowd-pulling pandas have plusher living quarters for good behavior.  The polar bears pin all their hopes on graduating from their concrete hell to the more impressive Beijing Aquarium in the northeast corner of the zoo.

That pretty much sums it up!  This is the first time I’ve seen the pandas up and walking around at the zoo, which was cool.  If you’ve never seen a squirrel before, you can go to 26 Birch Road to see them at my house, or you could just go to the zoo which has a concrete cell dedicated to the “common squirrel.”  We also saw some baby lemurs and Chinese camels before heading to dinner – the girls’ first experience with Chinese food and chopsticks.

Sunday and Monday included Beijing International Fellowship, a team dinner and meeting, visiting the world’s second-largest mall (which my friends and I aptly call “The Ugly Mall”), and eating food from a Chinese Muslim minority group.

Today they’re venturing out on their own and taking the subway to the center of the city to see Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City.