China - Day 14

Monday, July 27
a 37-hour day

This was our last day in China. DD's flight was in the morning. Our flight wasn't until late afternoon -- which meant that even though we'd cross the International Date Line, we didn't go forward to Tuesday before going back to Monday. Though, it is possible we may have gone back to Sunday before returning to Monday again. DS2 thinks it's most likely that we went forward to Tuesday before crossing the date line. ... It's academic since we slept most of the way back, and DD's flight didn't cross the Date Line. For us, midnight in Beijing to midnight in Chicago was 37 hours.

We had some time to wait before going to the airport and so went to the pedestrian street near the hotel. There were a lot of kiosks on the street. And yes, there are some US-based chains in China. We even tried them out. Papa John's in Shanghai was excellent. But, Pizza Hut in Beijing wasn't. KFC in Beijing was one of the best we'd been to anywhere. We ate at a different KFC than in the picture. That one was too crowded. (We needed to occasional break from Chinese food. And those three were the only times we went to non-Chinese restaurants.) In the evening, kiosks along this street sell unusual foods such as star fish.

And speaking of food, some usual foods in China are unusual to us. We bought some blueberry-flavored Pringles at an airport. A person in our group bought what he thought was a lime frozen ice pop but was actually pea-soup flavored.

... I see from my previous posts that I hadn't included any pics of lions -- which is odd since people on the tour were kidding me that I was trying to take a pic of every lion statue in China. So, here's one. It's from the Ghost City on the Yangtze. And, yes, there is a carved ball inside the lion's mouth. That's fairly common.

We learned a little Chinese. "hello" = ni hao. "thank you" = xei xei (shay shay). The symbol for China is a box with a vertical line through it. Entrance is a lower case lambda followed by a box. Exit is double lower case omega followed by a box. The family and I didn't figure out the symbol for sun (a ladder with 3 rungs or 2 boxes stacked atop each other) until we had a Firefly marathon. And, at least in southern China, a common greeting translates to "have you eaten" -- due to food shortages in the Great Leap Forward.

Our visit to China was great. It was sad when it was time to leave.

Edited to add a couple more pics. ... The first is a picture of water buffalo - taken outside of Wuhan - on our way to where we'd try to view the eclipse. There is a water buffalo grazing to the front of the picture. There are several more in the mid distance.

And here is a picture of a traffic light in Chongqing. We saw traffic lights like these in many of the larger cities. There were countdowns for both green and red lights.