Posting from Beijing

Beijing is a crazy city that makes NYC look small and slow in rush hour. That being said, it's also been managable and pretty amazing to see this city and country during a time of massive change- old, small winding Hutongs right next to massive sky scrapers. And a lot of the city is under construction for the Olympics. In fact, the night we arrived the road our hostel is on was filled with mud, pot holes, and huge piles of dirt. And literally, the next morning was paved.
We've eaten at an amazing veggie place- it had a vegetarian buffet, which was very exciting... lots of incredible dishes with vegetables, any kind of mushroom you can imagine, and lots of tofu. YUM. They also had mock snails and eel. Both were how I imagine the genuine article to taste- rubbery and more like the sauce than anything else.
Hiking the Great Wall was hands down the highlight of my experience here. It was very special to be hiking along such an incredible construction and also the scenery was breathtaking. We hiked an area 3 hours outside of Beijing, so were alone most of the time, which was a rare treat in this very packed city. Well, alone mostly- we were frequently followed by people trying to sell us things.
Probably the craziest thing we have done here was going to the Silk Market or the "Knock Off Market" where there are four stories of wares with brand names (but are not actually the real deal, so you can get a deal). It was absolutely the most aggressive sales I have encountered- not only were we constantly baraged by a cacaphony of "Looka Looka. You want to buy this? You want these Gucci bags? Good price for you." It was incredibly loud and I was also physically grabbed. At one point I had two women literally hanging on me, trying to pull me into their store. And because I was so much larger than them, I was dragging them down the aisle while telling them no! Mike had people shouting at him, "My God!" "You are so hot!" "You need a fan!" He had beaded sweat on his forehead due to the heat.
It was kind of fun to watch the interactions of other people. We watched one sales person yell at a customer, "Why won't you buy this? Buy this now!" And saw another customer start screaming at a store clerk and actually start trying to hit the clerk with her hand bag. She made several forceful lunges at the clerk, but was grabbed and wrestled by another customer. Wild!
We had a lovely dinner with a new friend, Kamal, the son of our friend in Seattle, Mary Jo. And we met his lively daughter, Day, too. It was really nice to get to connect with some people living in the city and here about their lives here.
Tomorrow we leave for Seattle bright and early...