Coming Home

This might sound crazy, but we didn't buy our tickets home from China until the day we left.

A couple months before we left, we looked into buying tickets home and they were a little (okay, a lot) more than we had planned on spending. So we decided to see what it would cost if we were to leave 3 days from then and the price was right.

So we decided to wait.

Two days before we planned to leave, the tickets for the next day were the right price but tickets for the day after were still quite high. But we had been checking all week and that was how the prices had been going. Plus, we wanted one more day.

But I had a nagging feeling we should leave then, as if it wouldn't be cheap the next day. It had been cheap the next day and not cheap the day after all week, so I figured it was just me being anxious to get home as quickly as possible. So we didn't buy the tickets.

The next day it still hadn't gone down, but we figured it most likely would by the time we got back from the wall.

It didn't.

The next morning, after a few prayers and a lot of searching in every travel site we could think of (even the chinese ones); we found some that weren't quite as cheap, but almost.
Ten minutes later we were on our way to the airport.

24 hours later we arrived in the Calgary Airport, tired but happy to be home!

In the Hong Kong airport

You're not a man until you've climbed the Great Wall

We did it. Our last day in China. The one thing we set out to do in China.
We climbed the Great Wall.
...and it was surprisingly steep and slippery. 
Luckily for us, it's the off season in China, so there wasn't too many people.
You also might be surprised to know that it's not as skinny as you thought it was. It really is just very long. And again with the stairs China!

Check it out.

The grand entrance

as convenient as gloves with a string on them are for not becoming lost,
they're not,
because the strings are to getting caught on things as iphone cords are to getting tangled

Chinese graffiti

Very Steep!

Oops, the wind ruined this one

I like this one a lot

Mike's a real man now. He has climbed the great wall!

I snuck into this family portrait :)

...and check out what this man is wearing!

After the Great Wall we went back to a place called the Pearl Market. The upper floors are dedicated to  pearls and other finery, but the bottom two floors are full of anything and everything that you don't need. 

We had a lot of fun in there. 

After sufficiently spending out money, we headed out for a quick dinner and then made our way to Mike's cousins, to stay the night. 

Yes, Mike has a cousin in Beijing.

Thanks so much Joshua and Ruth. We had so much fun kicken it with your kids and eating delicious pankcakes!

That's donkey we're eating!

...and yes, we thought it was delicous!

There are 9 million bicycles in Beijing

Welcome to Beijing.
It's cold, cold, and cold.
Or at least that's what it felt like after being in the rest of balmy China.
In my defence, it was colder in Beijing, than it was in Calgary.
Mike has this song in his itunes and it gets stuck in my head every time someone says Beijing, and what do you know, it was stuck in my head while I was in Beijing, there it was. Song by Katie Melua.
Anyway, after our all night train ride, we arrived, dropped our stuff off at the hostel, and then headed over to the Forbidden City.
Huge, beautiful, and so excessive. :)
Plus the sun coming through the smog gave the photos a really interesting effect.

There we go! 

It seriously goes on forever, and we were really lucky to go during the off season because for Chinese standards, it was quite empty.