anniversary

We hit two years on Tuesday! YAY! Time flies! It has been a wonderful adventure these past two years and we are looking forward to many, many more together!! :)

Monday night we went out to dinner at TGI Fridays... It was DELIGHTFUL! The meal cost us 4 times the amount of any meal we have had here in China (50 times what I paid for a gourmet Chinese lunch today with friends), and was well-worth every cent! We ate soup, salad, chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks with marinara, grilled vegetables, mashed potatoes, a HUGE steak (perfectly grilled) and a caramel sundae! We just kept saying if we ate fast we would not fill up before finishing! :) Needless to say, I was nearly heaving when we left!... But it was WONDERFUL nonetheless! This is a picture of us on our way to dinner....

Then Tuesday we both took the day off and we travelled to a small town a four-hour journey from Beijing. It was built during the Ming dynasty and because it is so small and inconvenient to get to (we had to take a taxi, the subway, a bus and then hitchhike to get there) it is very much "preserved"... all the buildings are the typical old-Chinese style with courtyards and small dirt/stone streets. We saw old donkey-powered rice grinders and the city wells are still there (but not in use). There are lots of remnants from the Cultural Revolution (that managed to even get to this town in the middle of no where). Faded paint with slogans like, "Long Live Mao!" and "Property-less people of the world unite!" are throughout the city. There are no restraunts or hotels, but the towns people told us that if we wanted to eat or stay the night, to just ask anyone and they would feed us or give us a bed (for a VERY small fee). So we asked someone to make us lunch. We asked for three dishes, and when we tasted the two meat dishes we got a touch nervous. We asked what kind of meat they were and she told us pork... our question got answered when we left and noticed on the side of her dwelling a hide and a hoof... from a mountain goat (the kind we had seen earlier near the town... alive). So basically Billy ate a billy goat for lunch. :) heehee....

I could write much more, but I always fill bad filling up the blog. I'll just add a few pictures from our day...

This is us above the town on the hill that they used to put the town bell in case invaders were spotted

"Use Mao Zedong thought to
reeducate our brain."... I think that says it all. :)





Someone lives here... the living quarters all looked like this, although some had real doors (not sticks, like this one).

Tons more I could say! :) Love you all! Glad to hear things went well last weekend. Love the pictures! Blogger has been on and off here... Today I can post, but cannot comment on anyone's posts...

Much Love!

Tami (and Billy)