Thanksgiving Day: Beijing

Thursday morning Lisa and I got up bright and early, hailed a taxi and made our way to the Qingdao airport. Just a few short hours later, we landed in Beijing and were greeted by our driver, Mark, who took us straight from the airport to the Great Wall. When we got in the car, Mark asked if we needed to stop for lunch. We told him that we brought some snacks, but if he needed to stop, that was totally fine with us. He mentioned that there's a "subaway" (apparently in Chinese it's difficult to say 2 consonants right next to each other. I think I'll just say "subaway" from now on...it's got a ring to it) right next to the Great Wall...which, at first, I'm wondering if we're really talking about the same thing. Somehow that didn't seem to fit the whole "ancient-ness" of the Great Wall. Just as he said, we pulled up to the entrance of the Great Wall...and the Subway sandwich shop. I was so humored by it, we got our sandwiches to go and took them up to the Great Wall with us and stood on the Great Wall while we ate them. Best Subway sandwich I've ever had...or at least best view while eating one?? It was pretty foggy (and icy) while we were up there, so my pictures didn't turn out all that great, but it was still a fun experience.


After spending a good portion of time exploring the wall, we headed back down to meet Mark to head back to Beijing. We checked in to our posh hotel, relaxed for a few minutes, then bundled back up to go do some sight-seeing. We ate dinner that night at Grandma's Kitchen, which is a restaurant that was started by an American grandmother living in Beijing. They even offered a traditional thanksgiving menu, but we opted for some chicken cordon bleu instead. Other than wishing we had sweet potatoes, it was a pretty dang good thanksgiving dinner :). We walked around a bit more after dinner, then stopped at Lisa's favorite restaurant, Peter's Tex-Mex, to get a slice of their homemade key lime pie to take back to the hotel. Once we were back at the hotel, we put on our pj's, talked for what seemed like hours, then decided to watch a movie and eat our pie. We were washing our faces, thinking it was somewhere around 10-11pm at night (we were tired from being up super early and doing a lot of traveling/walking), when I looked at the clock to find out it was only 7:45! Man, so pathetic! Oh well, we had a great hotel room and we were going to enjoy it! We watched Four Christmases (which I thoroughly enjoyed) and then called it a night.

view from our room