Day 2 in Beijing

Hello everyone. Today we ventured out of our hotel to visit a few sites . . . namely, the Temple of Heaven and its many labrynthian paths (joking, every path we took was in a perfect square around the temple . . . it just took a while to get our bearings, "North", "south", etc.) The highlight of the trip was definitely the Echo Wall where we literally stood and yelled at a wall so that someone from our group could hear our yells "echoing" from the other side. Yes, folks, we paid money to do this. We had a good laugh. Upon my blood sugars dropping dramatically, Tom and I and another couple took a taxi, headed (or so we thought) back to the hotel for a bite to eat. Little did we know that the driver misunderstood where we were headed (ok, I'm not going to point fingers, but T. was in the front seat and showed the guy, supposedly, the name of our hotel that was printed on a sheet of paper . . . unfortunately, there were other sites written on the paper as well and the taxi driver thought we were headed to the Palace Gardens instead . . . oops, about 50 mins. later we cut our losses and had him drop us off at the Sizzler & Haagen Daz. By this time, I was in total hypoglycemic mode and nearly jumped at the chance to eat a "steak.") We enjoyed our American type meal and then, of course, had to end it with ice cream at Haagen Daz. Not a bad ending to what could have been an extremely frustrating experience. The other nice thing is, little did we know, but we were w/in walking distance to our hotel so we headed back for a rest. We're still recovering from our escapade. Looking forward to seeing the Great Wall tomorrow.