Wandering the Forbidden City and The Great Wall - Part 4 of 4

After our visit to The Great Wall and receiving our certificate that recognized our accomplishment, it was time to return to the city for our last night in Beijing. As a momento of our stay in the Chinese capital of Beijing, we received a Tang jacket. This garment style evolves from traditional garments of the Menchu and Han Cultures, with the style dating from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In the 1940’s, it was adopted as customary attire for all classes in China. The garment has been worn by dignitaries and national leaders including Chinese president Jiang Zemin and President Bush.

To cap off our stay in Beijing, we received a formal invitation for a traditional Peking Duck dinner at the Qianmen Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant in Beijing. The restaurant was established in 1864, making it one of China’s most oldest. It is also Beijing’s most famous Peking Duck restaurant. The menu consisted of food items such as fruit appetizer, stewed snake-head’s roe in jar, braised duck leg with wild pepper, diced duck with cashew nuts, sweet and sour duck with pineapple, asparagus and mushroom with oyster sauce, quanjude roast duck, duck bone soup and dim sum.

When we got back to my hotel room, it was time for me to do some logging. When I travel, I always take notes so that I can write stories like this. In my backpack that I take with me when I travel, I always bring my video and digital cameras and my laptop, among other things. Normally, I keep my valuable laptop with me at my seat when I travel on an airplane or bus, but for some reason, today, I had decided to store it under the bus due to the cramped space above. This turned out to be a mistake. When we had gotten back to the hotel before dinner, I had found that the bus driver had kindly dropped the backpack beside the bus along with the other items that had been stored under the bus. I say dropped, because my laptop has not worked the same ever since. During the rest of my stay in China, I could get it to work long enough to send out an e-mail in the evening, sometimes it took several attempts, but any further logging was next to impossible, as the computer would turn off if I moved it or pressed it in the least possible way. After I got home, I was able to take some further notes on my desktop and also get my laptop working good enough so that at least now it will just turn off on its own once in a great while instead of every five minutes. To me, that is a lesson learned, to always take charge of my own laptop that is stored in my backpack.