turtles

This post is mostly to let you all know that my photos from the Great Wall are up!

Today we're all sore and tired from walking the Great Wall, so we ended up just taking the subway to the Pearl Market and buying some more touristy gifts for people, ate lunch at a sort of fast food place, and came back to the hotel room. Ying's napping right now and I think the others probably are too.

I got some nice headphones for 25 CNY :D and the touristy things here are really high-quality, as long as you steer away from the obviously crap items.

Ying says I'm getting good at bartering; in the more touristy places like the Pearl Market some of the merchants actually get mad at me even as they accept my price, like the lady who sold me two nice ties for 35 CNY. They're used to making a lot off of tourists, although I expect they also need to make more to cover the higher costs of renting the space.

Used one of my new sun umbrellas today; it really helped a lot. I'm also getting used to riding the subway, although not as comfortable as I was in Germany, since I still can't read any Mandarin and I don't think I ever will be able to.

I think I forgot to mention this yesterday - at the base of the Great Wall, Pamela and Neila had lunch at the Subway there, which was super expensive, like 35 CNY for a meal. I opted to go have pancakes with the Professor and Ying instead - they were only 5 CNY each, and delicious! They were savory pancakes, almost more like a soft taco shell, similar to the kind of pancakes you would wrap peking duck in. They were cooked on the spot, and you could have all sorts of things added - egg (cooked right on top of the pancake), some meats, onion, lettuce, some sort of crunchy fried dough. I opted to have a chocolate pancake, which was the pancake folded up around chocolate melted into it - it was delicious! The only thing I think that could make it better might be frying it briefly after folding it up, and/or sprinkling powdered sugar on top.