The Beijing Pedestrian Street (Tuesday, August 14th, 2018)

We slept in as long as possible this morning, leaving ourselves just enough time to get to breakfast before it closed. We were out of the room by 9:30, which gave us a little over 4 hours of sleep, so we were feeling good. 

When we finished breakfast, we were ready to go out and explore the city. Beijing is a city of over 23 million people. Our friend Tony told us this morning that all of southern California combined is only 19 million, so that gives you some perspective of how huge this city is. 

When Steve was here in 1995, he said that most of the traffic was bicycles and gas powered scooters. It has chabBnged a lot since then. All gas powered scooters have since been outlawed, allowing only electric scooters and manual or electric bikes to help with pollution and change the image of the city. There are now many more cars than there used to be as well. Normal people are now able to afford a car, which is the first time in Chinese history that this has been the case. Steve said that it has really helped to clean up the air. The pollution is much better than it was over 20 years ago.

We decided to head toward the pedestrian street (two blocks away from the hotel) first. 

We quickly discovered that there are huge indoor malls right on the pedestrian street, so we went in to check one of them out as well. 

This banner was on a pillar in the mall.  Cracked me up.

After taking in the overwhelming mall, we headed back outside to see what was on the streets.  We ended up in a very "local" part of town. 

It turns out that grilled scorpions are a delicacy in China.  We asked Jason later, and he told us that the scorpions are farm raised and their venom glands have been removed.

After he skewered them, they continued to wiggle for quite awhile.

 The locals eat all kinds of interesting food.

This part of the pedestrian mall was really hopping!

Another delicacy is whole fried chicken.  We ate it later and I have to say that it was the best fried chicken I have ever had!

As lunch time was approaching, we headed back toward the hotel. There was a little restaurant just a few doors down that looked good to us, so we went in and ordered. They had an English menu, which was nice, and one of their servers spoke a little bit of English which also helped. 

We ordered pork in spicy garlic sauce, garlic spinach and fried rice. When it came out, we had so much food!

It was way more food than we could eat, and it tasted great! In addition to the entrees we also ordered two beers, and our total bill was 106 yuan, which is about $15.00.

We decided that we would definitely like to visit this restaurant again if time permits.  We were the only Americans here, and there was a bit of a communication issue. The food was amazing and so close to our hotel!