Beijing: Day One

Matt and I decided to take a trip with a group of friends to Beijing. With me, being 7 months pregnant, did not stop us from having a once-in-a-lifetime experience! We left Rian with some friends and we ventured out to China for a short vacay.

Here we are waiting in the South Korea airport during our layover. We were so excited to get this vacation started! Our flight left at 3 am, so by the end of Day 1, we were exhausted!

Some of the things we were warned about before we headed out: Don't drink the water, or brush your teeth with it even. Which also means no eating fresh fruit/veggies because they were probably washed in the nasty water.

The city is heavily polluted......a complete understatement!
The toilets are basically porcelain holes in the ground.....pic to come in another post.

No toilet paper and/or soap in most of the public restrooms.

The crazy drivers! We have a video we will upload in another post and I will explain more there.

It was fun to experience it all :)

After we checked into our hotel (more on that in another post) we headed to lunch. This is where we ate.

Maybe I should mention that we had personal tour guide/translator and a driver everyday. So our itinerary was pretty much planned out and our tour guide picked out all of our restaurants and dishes.

This is the only picture I got of our food. Crispy shrimp, cabbage in some kind of soy sauce, a whole fish, green bean dish with what looked like hot dogs, a rice noodle dish, soup, and of course, rice.

At every meal, we were guaranteed to have rice (of course), a cabbage dish, and soup. Since I'm preggers, I was pretty cautious with the food. I did try many dishes, but I also packed some protein bars, peanut butter, and other snacks, just in case I needed them.

Those of you who know me would be pretty amazed at how easy-going I was on this trip, especially being in my third trimester. The food, all the walking especially with my SPD (we're talking over 5 miles a day), the toilet situation (which I obviously had to use often), etc. It all could have taken it's toll, I mean this isn't the place to go for the prissy, but Matt was pretty proud of how I handled it :) Kudos to me!!